


Four and More

by Barkour



Series: Barkour sampler [7]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-03-06
Packaged: 2018-03-16 13:58:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3490910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern, but four and more is a habit. Hera and Kanan have trouble navigating their relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four and More

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the bulk of this in November, then dawdled months till at last I wrote the last two scenes. 
> 
> This is AU, divergent from canon prior to the show, in that Hera and Kanan are, you know, sex buddies, sort of. Also I made up a little bit of backstory happenings for Hera, though not much. It jumps around in time, that very much. 
> 
> As I started writing it shortly after "Out of Darkness" aired, that's the most up to date the fic ever gets! Presume spoilers for all episodes prior to that, and expect spoilers for _A New Dawn_.
> 
> If you're worried about the sex scene stuff, skip to the end notes for some specifics about what stuff happens. Not a lot, really: I'm a pretty tame sex writer, haha.

“So,” said Kanan, “can I expect an explanation for that?”

He’d hitched his arse against the counter in the break room and hooked his thumb in a belt loop. The fingers of that hand curled beneath the ridge of his hip. 

“An explanation for what?”

Hera rapped his elbow with a spoon and he sidled down the counter so she could rummage through the cupboard for the sweetener. Turning so his back was to the counter, he stuck his legs out and crossed the one over the other.

“You said something about my not knowing everything there was to know about the _Ghost_.”

“Hmmm.” Idly she bounced the spoon between her fingers, alternating fingers to push the handle up or down. She blinked at him. “Did I say that?”

He was fighting the smile. “I seem to recall it, yeah.”

“You’re sure you aren’t just going soft in your old age?” 

Finding the sweetener, she closed the cupboard and carried the box to the caf distiller on the other side of him. He shifted. 

“Nah,” he said easily. “Going soft’s not a problem for me.”

She scoffed. “You can be honest with me. Face it, Kanan,” said Hera, as she poured the sweetener into her mug of caf and stirred, “you’re just a big softie. And you’re getting softer every day.” She clinked the spoon on the mug’s lip, shaking moisture off the bowl. “I think this whole apprentice thing’s revealed you for what you really are. One very tall marshmallow.” 

Kanan let her poke him in the belly with the spoon. He’d conceded the fight and grinned openly at her.

“You should talk,” he said, “Miss Mom.” 

She presented him with the spoon and he took it, turning it around between his fingers as he made for the sink. He found room enough in those two short strides to saunter. It was a peculiar talent of Kanan’s to roll his hips like that when he walked. Eyeing his backside as she did so, Hera sipped at her caf.

“Anyway,” she said, “you can’t blame me for wanting to maintain a little mystery.”

“Would have saved us a little stress when we were rescuing you.” 

He roosted by the sink. His hands cradled the edge; his forearms were relaxed upon the counter. 

“I can’t let you in on all of my secrets.” She rounded her eyes. “Oh, I know all about men like you. When the mystery’s gone, they’re off to find something new.”

The corners of Kanan’s smile curled. His gaze was steady and lidded. Slowly he blinked, but there was nothing innocent to it. As an actor he had much left to master.

“Mm,” he said. “You might not know everything about men like me.”

“I know enough.”

He shrugged his armored shoulder. “Maybe,” he said.

She nursed the caf for another long, sweet minute, as Kanan tapped his fingers one-two-three against the counter and watched her throat. One-two-three. His eyes flicked to her face. 

Hera cradled the mug. The sleek material was warm against her palms, through her gloves. She smiled at Kanan.

She meant to tease. “You weren’t worried about us, were you?” Instead she was gentle.

“I figured you could handle it,” he said. But his fingers still tapped.

His gaze lingered. He studied the shape of her cheek, and he did this without hurry. Then he snapped to meet her eyes. Hera considered the dark caf in the mug. 

“Tell me,” he said. 

She had thought of the creatures, creeping closer, their eyes glinting in the shadows as they smelled at the air—for Hera, for Sabine—with their tongues.

“You’re cheating again.”

He snorted. “The force doesn’t work like that. Not for me. I don’t need it to tell you’re upset.”

“I’m not upset.”

“You are,” said Kanan. He stroked a finger up the bridge of his nose then lightly down again. “You’re wrinkling.”

“Maybe because this caf is too bitter.”

“It’s not that. You poured in enough sweetener to kill a sugar fly.”

“C’mon,” he said. “Spill. I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

Hera sighed and drank the last of the drink, to the sticky sweet dregs that oozed. Tipping the mug, she watched as those dregs slithered along the curve, drawn inexorably south by the _Ghost_ ’s artificial gravity.

“Sabine could have died,” Hera said. She lowered the mug and looked to Kanan. “And it would have been my fault if she did. I shouldn’t have let her come with me.”

He folded his arms. “If you left her behind, she’d be in here instead of me to accuse you of not trusting her.”

“And she’d be alive.”

“She’s alive now,” said Kanan.

Hera rubbed her thumb against the mug. Then she straightened and offered it to Kanan, who took it without complaint and rinsed it under the tap. His shoulders bent. He tipped the mug over and shook it. Only the slightest sliver of his brown nape showed between the black brush of his hair and his sweater’s high collar.

“I put her at risk,” said Hera. 

“How were you supposed to know there was a risk?” Delicately he rested the mug in the rack to dry. “The way I see it, you’re both alive. And she knows that you trust her. That’s important to a kid like Sabine.”

She shook her head. “None of it because of me.” The familiar weight of her lekku trembled. Hera picked at her chin.

Kanan sighed. He neared her. He was beside her. He raised his hand to cup her hand, to lace his fingers a moment with hers.

“The only reason any of us are here,” said Kanan, “is you. Captain Hera.” His thumb brushed her gloved palm.

She looked at his fingers, his uneven nails, the cuticles he tended to press back with his thumb nail without noticing he did it. As she looked at his hand, he brought her hand up to kiss—fleetingly—the shallow dip between the knuckles of her first and second fingers. The leather of her glove obscured the warmth and the shape of his lips. This, what Kanan could give to her.

Their fingers separated. Their palms, too. He exhaled. 

Hera raised her eyes. Again, he was studying her. His brow had furrowed; then he smoothed it. The tension in his jaw remained. 

She tweaked his nose between finger and thumb and said lightly, “How about I give you a tour of my ship?”

Kanan said, “Yeah.”

*

When she lived alone on the _Ghost_ , Hera had no reason to dress before leaving her quarters. Loose pajama bottoms with a cord at the waist and an over-sized t-shirt she’d cut up the back then sewed partly together again, that she could slip into it feet-first: that was what she wore.

The shirt gaped in the back. As she hovered over the caf distiller, waiting for it to finish waking, she scratched between her shoulders. The _Ghost_ was warm. She liked it so. Some mornings, she didn’t mind the solitude. 

Hera was scratching her back with the sides of her fingers and thinking on the little pleasures of being on one’s own when Kanan walked into the kitchen. The door swished. She spun. The violence of her turning pinched her scalp, the heft of each lek pulling.

Kanan blinked. He looked as surprised as she was certain she must look to him. Well, who else had he expected to see?

“Uh,” he said. 

Who had _she_ expected to see? Mortification gripped Hera. With enormous clarity she realized she had entirely forgotten that yesterday morning Kanan had boarded the _Ghost_ and left Gorse with her.

His shirt was very tight and the hem curled to expose a long, brown slice of waist. He had a very thick trail of black hair running down the center. His feet were bare. Her head, she realized, was likewise bare.

Kanan rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his right hand, and Hera spun back to the caf distiller. It was chiming.

“Caf will be ready in four minutes,” said Hera. “Or—well, probably five, if it’s slow today. And it’s always slow.”

She grabbed a second mug off the crowded dish rack. Now that she had a crewman, Hera thought, she would have to start actually putting dishes away. Her stomach hurt her.

He was still rubbing at his eyes. “Nah—let me. I got it.” His jaw cracked as he yawned. He shuffled over to the rack and began setting dishes on the counter into sorted piles. Plates, bowls, mugs. 

“Probably gotta start earning my keep somehow.”

He was rough with sleep. Hera glanced at him. He’d pulled his hair back again. His nape showed, deeply brown and sticky with sweat. Humans didn’t lose body heat as quickly as a Twi’lek did. She had to adjust the temperature down to a compromise. Sweat, too, in the small of his back, exposed between the hem of his shirt and the waistband of his trousers.

He turned. “Where…” Kanan stopped, bowl in hand. He squinted at Hera, who was staring fixedly at the distiller.

“Bowls go in that cabinet. Plates beside them.”

He pulled the door open then paused. “There’s nothing in this cabinet…”

“I haven’t had a lot of time to organize anything recently,” she said.

Setting the bowl on the lowest shelf as a placeholder, he reached into the back of the middle shelf and drew out a red box that Hera could not recall.

“These spices are expired.”

Hera drummed her fingers on the counter. “They might have come with the ship.”

“Don’t you cook?” He began stacking boxes of spices in the sink, frowning at the expiration date on each.

“It’s not my specialty, no,” she said.

Done with the spices, he moved on to the fresher. 

“What do you have that’s not going to kill you?”

“Plenty!” Hera protested. “I’ve done perfectly well by myself. Thank you.”

“There’s nothing in here.”

“I have food—”

“What—MREs?” he scoffed; then he swung open the ground level cupboards next to the fresher and said, “Oh, are you _kidding_ me? Really? MREs?”

“They’re affordable, easy to make, and easy to clean up,” Hera said, stomping over to close the cupboard with a bang. “All three of which are important—”

“Was the food in the bar the first time you had anything to eat that wasn’t freeze-dried?” Kanan was saying as he stood straight.

“—certainly better than not eating anything at all—”

“Not by much.”

“Well!” said Hera. She crossed her arms over her chest and stuck her nose up. “What would you make, then?”

He grinned at her. It crinkled his left cheek.

“Actual food.”

“Bar food is not actual food.” The distiller dinged and Hera pushed past him to fix her mug. 

“It’s better than an MRE,” he said. “Hey—ah—your shirt’s open in the back.”

Sweetly Hera said, “Your shirt’s riding up your chest,” and left him to fix his own morning caf if he wanted it so badly. She glanced over the mug before the door closed again. He’d his thumbs hooked in his shirt, and he was tugging it down. Hera hid her grin in her caf and went to dress.

She guided the _Ghost_ out of hyperspace a couple hours later, into the transit zone some short distance from a hub station. The star-lines stuttered then burst into myriad pinpoints.

“Already?” 

Kanan rested his arms on the back of the passenger seat. He’d put a rumpled jacket on over his tight shirt, a leather jacket with several pockets, all empty. He carried little on him, but then he’d brought little with him.

“Thought you wanted to put some distance between you and the imperials.”

Hera had dressed more appropriately, a time-consuming task she moved through as quickly as she could. The shape and position of her head-tails meant that she had to step into her shirts, as she did trousers, and then zip them. She could not, as Kanan did, or any other like him could, simply pull a shirt on over her head. The cap too was complicated, with three zippers, one each on the outside of tchun and tchin and a longer zipper between her lekku, so the cap could be removed in two pieces. 

In such ponderously fixed layers, she was thus safely removed from Kanan, separated physically in a way she was not in her night shirt.

“Well,” said Hera. “You can only hope for so much distance.”

He’d shaved in the intervening hours, cleaning his jaw. The scruff at his chin remained. His eyes were narrow as he studied the bulk of the station, gradually filling the viewport. Hera relented.

“The imperials avoid Star Briar. No troopers. No agents. No fuss.”

“That doesn’t sound like the Empire.”

“What it should sound like,” Hera said, “is Hutt territory.”

He turned to her, his brow arched. “We’re in the Outer Rim? Already?”

“I told you my baby was fast.” Hera patted the console lovingly.

Kanan whistled lowly. More air than whistle, really, and Hera fiddled with the landing request beacon as an excuse to hide her smile. 

“You don’t have to come with me.” She settled back to wait for approval. “I’m just going to be collecting messages.”

“More rabble-rousers.”

“Mm. Maybe,” she said. “But if you wanted to join me, I’d be happy for the company.”

“Behind on your recruitment quota?”

“No quota.” The clearance arrived and Hera toggled the controls, directing the _Ghost_ into the approaching lane. Incoming was always a delicate thing, even in regulated environs. Without looking to Kanan she said, “It just seems like a waste of your talents.”

She nearly bit her tongue for saying it. They had neither of them broached the subject.

The docking chamber neared, but a small, square cave in the side of the enormous asymmetrical station. Busy with landing prep, Hera let her tongue lie.

“I’ll go down with you.”

Hera turned, surprised. “You will?”

“Not for your solo rebellion,” he said, pointing a finger at her. “I need to pick up some supplies. There’s got to be a market on this thing, right?”

So, this would lie too. In the moment of the revelation, as the explosions illuminated his dark face, and he touched his finger to her lips, Hera had looked at Kanan in a wonderment so profound she had felt as she had not felt since she was a child, as if she were certain in faith rather than willfully faithful.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he’d said.

She nodded. What could she have said? The man from the bar—the unshaven pilot who did noble things then flirted with a sleazy smile—a Jedi. She had thought, and I’ll never see him again, and then he was there in the hangar with a hand in his pocket and his face turned down but his eyes cast up, like a boy.

Hera cleared her throat. “Haven’t you been to a space station before? Mister Pond Hopper. I’m sure you’ve seen all sorts of interesting things.”

“But nothing more interesting than you,” he demurred. 

“Mm-hm,” she said. “You know, you’re surprisingly provincial for a guy who’s seen everything.”

“That’s me,” said Kanan, “just a good, old-fashioned homebody.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” said Hera. “And here I thought you might like to go wandering.”

Teasing him with his own, days’ old invitation was perhaps too far across the line. He let it roll over him, shrugging. Not only his shoulders: his arms got in on the action, too. He was expressive with his body in ways she was unaccustomed to seeing in humans.

“Might like to.”

She cut back on the throttle, and the _Ghost_ bumped against the magnetic locking clamps. The interior of the docking chamber was blistering in its brightness, a piercing counterpoint to the dominating shadows of space.

“Wouldn’t be you’re just using me as a free taxi?”

“Free? Nah,” said Kanan, “I’m good for it. Besides, I haven’t finished organizing that kitchen.”

On the turbo-lift on the other side of the air lock, Hera turned to Kanan.

“You’ll need the access code to get on the _Ghost_.”

“It’s your ship,” said Kanan. “I can wait.”

Hera hesitated. “My errand might … take some time.”

He leaned against the back wall of the lift with his arms folded beneath his chest. His eyes were closed; he looked very relaxed. She wondered if it was a Jedi thing or a Kanan thing.

“How much time?”

“Too long for you to be comfortable waiting in the corridor,” said Hera. She twisted her chrono about her wrist and studied the changing floor number on the lift’s read-out. “Besides, it isn’t very safe here.”

Kanan opened one eye to squint at her. “Are you worried some goons are going to pick me up?”

“Well,” she said, “it happens now and then. And I’ve seen you in fights. You’re all right, but—”

“But nothing.” He’d closed his eye again. Now he was frowning slightly at the corners of his mouth. “I can hold my own. Figured you would have seen that, too.”

“Ah,” said Hera. “Of course. Why don’t I give you that access code anyway?”

She told him the string of eleven numbers as he stood, shoulders to the wall, fingers twitching against his arm. He nodded.

“Got it.”

“All of it?”

His eyelashes rose. The suggestion of a frown eased. He was once more easy-going, the harmless and care-free flirt.

“When a woman with a voice like yours talks,” he said, “I don’t forget a word she says.”

Hera snorted noisily, and he looked at her with something like delight.

“How is it you have that ship all to yourself?”

“I don’t,” she said dryly, “yet.”

“Early days,” he said.

The lift stopped.

“Can I ask what supplies you so desperately need?”

“You can.”

He followed her off the lift into a crowded triple-wide corridor. 

“So what supplies do you need?” 

Kanan raised his empty hands out, palms up, and shrugged them. Hera clicked her tongue.

“You said I could ask.”

“But never said I’d answer,” he said. “You already know something about me. So it’s only fair that’s all you get till you let me in on something about you.”

“Something about me,” she repeated.

“You,” he said, nodding.

She eyed him. His expression was open, pleasant. He meant precisely what he said. Not that sort of traveling companion, he’d assured her; and she had believed him. She did believe him. He was a flirt, she thought, as she would often think; but he wasn’t a liar. He hadn’t lied to her on the _Forager_.

“Something about me,” she said again. Then she smiled at him. “I trust you not to steal my ship.”

He was staring at her. The fingers of his right hand half-curled. He dropped the left hand to his side; then he brushed at his nose with his right. 

Hera patted his arm as she moved around him. “Just remember, the _Ghost_ is a dry ship.”

“Convenient,” said Kanan, “as I’m recently sober.”

They parted, Hera to find a discreet holo café and Kanan to find that unknown market he was so eager to explore. 

As the station was out of direct imperial control the terminals could be counted as clean of the government’s spyware. Hutt spyware, however, was rampant, and information—particularly of a treasonous bent—had financial value. 

Hera disabled the terminal’s security drivers, rooted out three programs and locked them, and at last sent the encrypted wake up call to the cloud server. Twice she changed cafés, and it was several hours till she returned to the _Ghost_.

An odd smell greeted her. An equally odd noise: something fatty was frying in a pan. 

Kanan had not taken the _Ghost_ ; he had not left. Hera stopped just inside the door to stare at what he had done with her kitchen.

Three cupboards were open, groceries largely unpacked and sorted in them. A few more bags crowded the one small table with its one small chair. Kanan, without the light jacket, was at the collapsible oven top with a very new pan and an old fork. 

“Hey,” he said. He speared the slab of meat and flipped it over then yanked the fork out, using the edge of the pan to do so. All this without hesitation. “Finished with your errands?”

“Ah,” said Hera. She sidled into the kitchen. “Yes.”

He glanced shrewdly at her. “Let me guess. Nothing I want to know about.”

“Unless you’ve changed your mind and decided to join my righteous cause,” she said. “What is that?”

“Real food,” said Kanan, “and no, I haven’t changed my mind.” He grabbed a spice bottle, indistinguishable to Hera’s eye from any of the others newly placed in the cabinet.

She wouldn’t press. He’d come around. Hera had seen enough of him on Gorse to know, whatever he liked to play at, he was a fundamentally noble person.

“So what did you do with all the real food I had?”

He gestured to the cabinet on the end. “The expired packs, I tossed.”

“They’re MREs,” Hera said, checking the cabinet. Rows of ready to eat meals in their plain brown wrappers filled the bottom shelf and only that. “MREs don’t expire.”

“That tells me everything I needed to know,” said Kanan. “It’s a miracle you haven’t pitched over from food poisoning. Trust me. You’ll love this.”

Closing the cabinet, Hera turned to reconsider the kitchen: the dry food stuffs in the cupboards, the new pan he was shivering over the burner, the fresher likely as full now as it was empty before.

“How much did this cost?”

“Probably not as much as you think,” said Kanan. “Not to brag, but I’m a halfway decent haggler.”

“Not even you could have sweet-talked the most generous merchant in this sector of the galaxy to give you all this,” said Hera.

He scratched at his jaw. “Well—I might have worked a card game or two.”

Hera laughed. “And how long did it take them to catch on to you?”

“Couple of plays into the next hand,” said Kanan. He peeked slyly at her. “You should play me sometime.”

“Maybe,” said Hera, “but I’d hate to leave you in debt.”

“I could work it off,” he said. “What do you want to drink, by the way? No booze, but I can make a mean non-alcoholic fruit cocktail.”

“Water would be fine.”

“Then it’s water,” said Kanan, and he slid the meat from the pan to a chipped plate.

The table with its one chair could not fit them. Suspecting the easy joke—that she sit in his lap or he in hers—Hera suggested they eat in the common room, on the couch. Kanan agreed. 

“Where did you learn how to cook? It wasn’t as a freighter pilot. And it wasn’t at the bar.”

“Could have been.”

“Not a bar like that,” she said. “So where was it?”

“Around.” He twirled his knife as if this demonstrated anything.

“Well, wherever it was you learned how to do it,” she said, pointing her fork with its cube of steak, “this is good.”

“Better than MREs?”

Chewing the bit of steak, Hera tapped the fork’s tines to her lip. “I’ll allow it.”

“Not so bad,” he said, “having crew.”

“Early days,” said Hera, deliberately light.

The echo was not lost on Kanan. His mouth twitched: a concession, or of pleasure; perhaps both. He drank from his glass; water, same as she had. The bottom ticked as he set it on the gaming table.

“So I’ll take care of meals.”

Meals implied a schedule. “I keep odd hours,” she warned. 

“Never bothered me. You don’t have to eat it,” he said. “Just look at it and think about what you’d rather have in your belly when you go out on some hare-brained, save the galaxy, and all the little Neti seeds, mission.”

He was more contained than she’d seen him yet: bent over the table rather than loose-limbed and sprawling. Chatty, too, in a way she associated with drunks, but then he had been as chatty on Gorse and she’d only once seen him with a drink in his hand there.

Hera watched him eat and thought about that. He was very good-looking. She thought that as well. The lighting in the common room was dim; the power cells needed changing. The shadows might have accentuated the lean shape of his jaw but then she was already aware of that angle. She lowered the fork. Her meal was half-done. A small weight sat in her gut.

“You know that nothing is going to happen between us,” she said.

“You told me,” said Kanan.

“What I’m trying to do, that takes precedence over everything else.” She said, to emphasize: “Anything else.”

He clasped the fork between his hands, left to hang off his knees. He regarded her steadily. 

“If you think I’m here because I want to screw you,” he said, “then forget about it. That’s not why I’m here.”

She hadn’t asked him yesterday. She hadn’t wanted to push. The confessional was still in the heft of the air about them then. She didn’t ask now either.

“Just so we’re clear,” said Hera. “I’d be happy to call you a comrade—” 

His lips pressed. For once, though, he made no protests of disinterest in what he persisted in characterizing as her rebellion.

“And I’m glad to call you crew,” she went on, “and I think you’ll find the new job interesting. I could certainly use your skill. We could use your skill. But that’s all I’m ever going to ask you for.”

“All right,” he said. His brow was smooth, his eyes lidded and lazy. He made no move toward her, nor, for a few minutes, did he speak. He simply let it sit there between them.

The common room was cooler than Hera preferred it. Before they had left the _Ghost_ she had reset the environmental controls to a lower temperature that the ship would gradually cool in their absence. The days of walking about the _Ghost_ in loose shirts as the corridors sweltered were—for now—behind her.

She thought fleetly of Kanan’s gaze flicking politely away from her in the kitchen. She thought of how bare her back had felt, how bare her chest, how lean the cut of his hip where it jutted from his waistband.

Condensation marked her glass and smeared across her fingers. Hera sipped at the water rather than drank. The stone in her belly had yet to shift.

He stirred. Uncrossing his legs, he stretched them as though to wake.

“You could call me Kanan.” 

She looked at him through the glass. The defined swell of his mouth was distorted in the water, so too his slanted shoulders. He held his hands up, fork pinched between thumb and forefinger so the tines jutted as if from his right hand.

“I promise, I won’t get any fresh ideas. On my honor as a card shark.”

Setting her elbow on the table, Hera propped her chin on her palm. Her fingers cupped her jaw. She toyed with her glass, her thumb drawing an unclean line through the moisture.

“How far does a card shark’s honor go?”

“Far enough,” said Kanan. “Or I could promise on my honor as a guy who knows better than to mess up something good.”

She curled her fingers in so her nails pinched her lips. Still the smile crept along to her eyes.

“She _is_ a nice ship. That’s why you’re going to clean up the kitchen.”

“Hey,” said Kanan, all easy charm as he stretched against the couch’s back, “you can trust me.”

Her smile dimpled beneath her fingers.

“We’ll see about that,” said Hera.

*

He tugged her over the second peak with his fingertips. Hera went willingly. Her fingers knotted in his rough hair, and she arched against him and sighed against the warmth of his temple. Pleasure pulsed in her, a series of tightening waves that then loosened.

Kanan kissed her lingeringly on her cheek, his lips warm and dragging. His come dotted her thigh and the sheet beneath her, so that as she stirred she brushed through it. He moved his fingers inside her, coaxing her through the little aftermath. Rough, the pads of his fingers rubbing inside her, but his touch was steady.

Her lekku were brushed back from her head, heavy on his bracing arm. The hair thick on his arm scratched but lightly at her skin. Like the stickiness of his come, this was not unpleasant. 

At last he drew his fingers from her. Cupping her hip, he allowed her to push him on his side that she too might curl on her side, so they faced one another in the darkness of his quarters, his back to the wall and her back to the door. His hand was slick; that was her come. 

She pressed her forehead to his and tried to steady her breath. The hand on her hip rose. Just the once, he petted tchun, the left lek, smoothing the length of it with his palm but never grasping. 

“Hey,” said Kanan.

She smiled. “Hey.”

He dropped his hand again to her hip. Without the lights she could not tell where he looked, if to her mouth or to her hips or, perhaps, her breasts or lower. Uniform shadows blanketed his features, too far within the greater shadow made by the upper bunk for detail. 

Her eyelids drifted low. Hera wiggled on his arm, pushing her head higher so the drape of her lekku would pull less painfully at her scalp.

He stroked a lopsided circle along her hip with his thumb.

“This is usually the part where you leave.”

“Mm,” said Hera. “It is.”

The callus on the pad of his thumb scraped deliciously over her skin. He turned his arm beneath her, to cup her head in the crook of his elbow.

“So.”

“So.”

“All right,” Kanan said.

She brushed her hand idly up his side. Muscular, but leanly so: in coats he looked thin. Only naked did he seem correctly proportioned to what he could do. With her wrist she rediscovered the three small moles tucked in an uneven string between his fourth and fifth ribs.

“We shouldn’t be doing this.”

He nodded. “You’ve said.”

“This really has to be the last time,” said Hera. 

Her knee slipped between his legs. Cozily she bent her leg, so her thigh would wedge between his thighs, and she rubbed her cheek against his clavicle. 

His voice warmed. A laugh husked in his throat as he rested his chin on top of her head. The hand of his bent and cradling arm toyed lightly with the end of tchin, the right lek.

“See, you say that…”

Hera pinched his thigh, and he nudged her in return with his knee.

“Fourth romp’s the charm?”

“It really should be the last.”

“Ah,” he said. “You said ‘should’ that time.”

She slithered her leg higher, pressing gently at his groin in rebuke. Soft yet, but he made no move to pull away from her as he would if truly tender. She had never stayed long enough before to find out how long it might take for Kanan to rouse again.

Hera reached for his jaw with her bare hand. His beard was wiry on her palm. He moved slightly. His lips brushed her hairless brow.

“You could stay.”

Sighing, she withdrew from the hollow of his throat. Tipping her chin up, she looked for his eyes in the dark. Of course she could not see his expression. 

“But you won’t,” he said.

“And you know perfectly well why.”

He rubbed the blunt tip of tchin between thumb and first finger. The nerves were more delicate there, the tendons more precise, the muscles slimmer and more numerous; all to facilitate communication. 

Too clever by far, she thought. The pit of her belly itched; desire spooled sweetly there. He guided tchin up and bowed to kiss that sensitive tip. His lips were pursed. The wetness of his mouth surrounded the very end of tchin, a moment. Hera set her teeth. Some late echo of her orgasm worked inside her.

“Tell me again,” said Kanan. His breath whispered over her skin. 

They both of them needed no reminders. She had told him after each encounter why it could not happen again; why it would not happen again. Kanan had watched her with his pale eyes and nodded. I know, he would say; or: Yeah; and he would not hold her to prevent her dressing and leaving. 

She knew now how it would go after she had left him. In the morning they would pretend no thing had changed between them. Kanan would make caf as she liked it and breakfast as he liked it. Seated at the far end of the couch Zeb would snort under his breath but keep all else to himself. 

Three months, she thought as Kanan waited. Maybe even five. 

Hera would spot Kanan bent over the game table with his thumb between his teeth, and she would think of a lek pulled over her shoulder and his teeth closing lightly about the tip.

Or she might hear him laughing at Zeb’s impression of a stormtrooper, and she would recall how Kanan groaned as she took his erect cock deep within her and how he would then arch and clutch her hips as if the moment she began to move he might break. 

A couple hours ago—after the mission—he had stripped out of his burnt sweater in the _Ghost_ ’s hold. 

“Bunch of scrap metal,” he was snapping at Chopper. “You almost got us killed.”

Chopper squealed and waved his arm in useless threat.

“Don’t blame Chopper because you weren’t paying attention,” Hera said sharply. She bypassed the last few steps on the ladder by leaping off from it. “What were you doing down there? Did you want to die?”

Kanan snorted and tugged the sweater free of his hair. His shoulders flexed, long and darkly brown. He passed his hand over his face. 

“Sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I wasn’t paying attention.”

Hera eyed him. At last she eased. Lightly, she punched his shoulder. “So long as you recognize that I was right and you’re wrong.”

“Always,” said Kanan dryly. “I need to go take a shower.”

Folding the ruined sweater, he tucked it under his arm and made for the ladder. Like wings, his shoulder blades tensed; they rippled, trapped beneath his smooth skin. 

She had heard his sudden, short swear over the comm before the link shut off. Three minutes to reestablish contact. Coldly, she had known to expect the worse; she could not expect it. Each time she said his name into the waiting static Hera had thought: now he’ll say something smart. She had thought, too, of that night Zeb carried him back to the _Ghost_ , Kanan bleeding from his back and tight-mouthed with embarrassment and anger.

“I need a shower too,” Hera called. 

At the landing above, he paused.

“Maybe I’ll join you,” she’d said.

Always she was the one to start it. Always she went to him.

He was waiting for her, his arm beneath her, his other hand stroking tchun from root to end. Intimate rather than sexual. Her wanting did not distinguish between the two. The intimacy of his fingers moving over tchun was itself sexual.

She breathed in through her nose and stirred. As she sat upright, Kanan furled his arm, flexing his wrist to restore the circulation. He, too, shifted; his legs let her go.

Hera cut him off before he spoke.

“Before we do this again,” she said, her weight braced on her right hand, her left arm languid across her thighs, “we need to set down some ground rules.”

For a long moment he studied her. So little light on his narrow, bony face, yet she knew his gaze. His wrist bent. He laid his hand on his chest.

“Sounds smart,” said Kanan. “What did you have in mind?”

*

She felt it as a wasp sting. A piercing bite, like a needle to lance a boil. The recoil twisted her leg back and Hera staggered. She grasped at the metal rail to prevent tumbling down the stairs on her neck. That was when the pain exploded in her thigh, like a bursting star. Over that gripping heat she recognized the belated crack in the air, the sound of the shot that had hit her a second before.

She was near the overhang. She had very little time. An odd smell in the air, like burnt powder. Hera swung forward with her arms and landed in the shadow on her toes. Her right leg buckled; she fell against the rail again.

Karabast. She didn’t realize she had said it till it stung her mouth. Something the new hire liked to say. Shit, it meant, or more accurately: “to be buried in the dung of the groost-st beast,” Zeb had translated. “It means shit.”

Keep moving. The steep metal stairs ran along the outside of the ten story tall beacon tower. They jogged beneath her, vibrating perhaps from the wind or with the weight of the men tailing her. 

Hera gritted her teeth and forced on, using her right foot to propel rather than walk. Fumbling in her sleeve she bent her hand forward to depress the alert on the wrist chrono. 

Rendezvous now, the signal meant. It would pulse once to Zeb and Kanan’s chronos as well as any other unrelated like devices within a two kilometer radius. The spam would inhibit anyone’s attempts to track the boys, at least. They already knew her location. For the moment.

An exit door on the third story was unlocked. She’d left it so. As she approached it, she bent to check her thigh. The skin hadn’t cauterized, as it ought have sealed at a blaster shot. Blood darkened her trousers; it welled from her leg and sat heavily in the cloth. Without a light she could see little in the covered section of the stairs. She had to trust she hadn’t bled through, that her foot steps were clean. 

The chrono could be tracked. She unhooked it, smashed the face on the rail, and threw it up the stairs; then she took the last few steps to the landing, passed quietly through the door, and sealed it at her back. 

Her leg burned. Don’t think of it. Don’t panic. Be steady. Like flying. Hera hobbled through the darkness to an internal staircase. Her gut ached; more steps. She pushed through it. 

Up again to the fourth story. From there to the covered sky walk that connected to the auxiliary generator building. She was dragging her leg. So little time. Be quick but remain calm. Her pulse beat in her thigh. Each compression her heart made pumped more blood into her trousers. 

The tower had a garage in the lowest level but that would be sealed. The generator building would have utilities vehicles. She could hot-wire just about any engine in the Middle and Outer Rims; she’d had to. 

More stairs to the underground utilities level, where the rail-slaved cars were kept. Hera got it going and followed the rail to the business district. In the car she fashioned a tourniquet for her leg with a grease rag she found in her coveralls. 

It wasn’t enough. Her stomach was turning. The blood flow slowed but continued, as it would so long as she continued to move. She couldn’t afford to slow. The rendezvous. 

Another engine to hot-wire. She moved through the lower levels of the garage, in the basement of some private corporation’s building. There, she thought: a sleek, new model Skyflit equipped with auto-pass decals. The flyer of an ambitious low-level exec who spent more than they earned. 

The outside of the flyer was beautiful, but the undercarriage showed the telltale markings of a flyer that had been salvaged after an accident and resold at a tremendous markdown. Her mind was wandering. Bypassing the lock codes, Hera jumpstarted the engine. 

“Trust in the Force,” Kanan had said once, rather sarcastically, shortly after he had thrown his lot in with hers. She had to trust something. The engine hummed sweetly but the throttle had a constant choke to it she very much did not trust.

The interior of the Skyflit did have a man’s coat in it. On the long sub-highway she set autopilot and fashioned a new tourniquet, a tight one. Her skin pricked. She was sweating, a cold sweat. In the reflective mirror that ran along the top of the windshield Hera saw her features rendered dull in color.

The rendezvous point was on the far side of the city. She emerged from the underside, parked two blocks down and west, and crossed through the alleys. They were waiting for her with the _Phantom_.

The back hatch opened. The new hire leaned out.

“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. Then he caught a whiff of her before she passed out of the alley’s shadow and into the lurid, artificial pink and yellow lights of the city’s night time hours. 

“Karabast,” said Zeb. He lurched out of the ship to haul her up. He’d something dark matting his short, coarse fur. 

“What is it?” Kanan asked. Driver’s seat. Of course.

“She’s shot, that’s what it is.”

Kanan turned suddenly. His jaw spasmed. She saw in the subsequent stillness of his face precisely how serious the injury showed. Then Kanan turned as abruptly away and jacked the stick, pushing the _Phantom_ into the air.

“Get her in and shut the hatch. We’re hitting a clinic.”

Zeb eased her on to one of the booth-like benches in the back of the ship and moved to haul the hatch up.

“No, we’re not,” Hera said. She grabbed at the hanging straps and leveraged her self into the front cabin. “They know I was shot. They’ll be watching the clinics.”

Kanan swore: a long and profane string of some Core dialect. 

“Move over.”

“You’re not flying,” he snapped.

“I’m the better pilot.” She clung to the strap hanging behind the pilot’s seat.

“You’re the bleeding pilot.”

“And still the better pilot,” she said. 

Kanan swore again and unbuckled. She grimaced as she moved to sit, and his hand fell to her elbow; he touched her waist too. Perhaps she ought to have pulled from him but she was grateful for the steadying contact. 

Hera toggled the stick and moved the _Phantom_ into a more delicate ascent, less likely to draw attention. As she had, he remained behind the pilot’s seat, with a hand splayed across the back of the seat as he held on to the strap. The movement of the _Phantom_ gentled. 

“The whole exchange was a set up,” Kanan said. “Someone tipped off the local system garrison.”

“Looks that way,” Hera said.

Zeb nosed into the cabin. “This happen often?” 

“Never,” Hera said shortly. 

“Well, it did tonight,” said Zeb.

Kanan shifted. His fingers brushed the base of her head, where it tapered to her neck. To calm. She still churned. 

Chopper held the _Ghost_ in a radar blind, a shelter created by radiation dense cliffs made by some long ago detonation. The ship’s triple thick hull would keep the poison out. Ship building regulations required that any jump capable freighter have a hull able to withstand the concentrated and irregular radiation bursts of hyperspace. The _Phantom_ had no such shielding, and so Hera poured on the throttle to drive it home. Her head thrummed, over-hot. 

When she made to stand, her knee buckled. Kanan scooped her into his arms without asking.

Zeb said, “Let me—”

“I got her,” said Kanan. He hitched her high in his arms. His hands gripped her knee, her waist. His breath was warm on her brow. “Hold on to my neck.”

“Cheeky,” Hera murmured. “You wouldn’t be flirting with me, would you?”

He grunted and shifted her so he braced her against his chest with one arm, freeing his other arm to climb the ladder out of the hangar. 

“What do you take me for?”

“Because that would be—not what we agreed on.” She grimaced. Each step jostled her leg. 

“Almost done,” Kanan said. “Remind me what we agreed on.”

“No funny business.”

“Not sure about you,” he said, hoisting her to both arms again. “But I’m not finding a whole lot to laugh about right now.”

Chopper met them in the corridor to complain. 

“Out of the way, Chop,” Kanan ordered. 

He shoved Chopper aside with his foot, and Chopper squealed. Infuriated, he trundled after them into the kitchen. It was when Kanan set Hera on the table that Chopper twigged on to the situation. His tone modulated. 

“Looks worse than it is,” Hera told him.

Chopper doubted that.

“Where’s the med kit?”

Hera closed her eyes and began, blindly, to fumble for the zippers and buttons that kept her dressed. 

“Kitchen’s your space.”

“Droyk petchuk!” 

He slammed the cupboard shut then paused and moved back to the far end of the counter, hauling the double-sized med kit from the cabinet below.

“Uh-oh,” Hera said. “That’s the big one.” They mostly only needed the smaller med kits stored throughout the _Ghost_.

Hera shucked the straps of her coveralls and peeled out of the long-sleeved shirt underneath. Bared to the waist but for her shift, the cold, sterile air hit her hard. She crossed her arms reflexively then, reluctantly, she unfolded them to work at the waist zippers. 

“Don’t worry about that.” Kanan dropped the med kit beside her and popped the lid. “I’ll get it. Take this.”

She dry-swallowed the painkillers. The chalky taste stuck in her throat. Distressed, Chopper lectured her about the fragility of flesh.

“What’s he saying?” Kanan asked. His head was bent. He worked nimbly to untie the tourniquet.

“He’s sorry he missed the fun.”

Kanan whipped the bloodied scrap of coat behind him. The fabric landed wetly on the floor.

“Beat it, Chop.”

“What do you need me doing?” Zeb danced about to let Chopper storm by through the door.

“Run the broadband receptors,” Hera said. Her breath was shallow. She focused. “Any chatter you pick up about the search, let me know.”

“You’re not doing anything else tonight,” Kanan snapped.

“If they do sight searches we have to move.”

He closed his hand on her hale thigh to still her. His thumb was firm, pressing into her. 

“Stop moving now.”

Zeb thumped the door and said, “Broadband. Got it. You want I should use comm or…”

“Internal comm’s fine,” Hera said. She braced as Kanan palpated her leg, his fingers moving to frame the wound. In the slight delirium of blood loss she thought he meant to pop it like a zit. “Wait—”

He fisted the cloth and ripped her trousers leg. Her coveralls were made of a heavy canvas, but the shot had torn through, leaving a jagged seam Kanan exploited. 

The wound was hideous. Hera stared, fascinated, at it. She had never seen a blaster make an injury like that. Blood pooled blackly at the heart of it; the clotting made the blood thick. 

“Gun shot,” said Kanan.

She looked blankly at him. “What?”

He was moving swiftly now, unpacking supplies from the med kit. “Antique firearms. Powder and shot. There’s a slug in you.”

“Ah,” said Hera. That explained a great deal of it. “Those weren’t Imperials.” The Empire’s men were outfitted with mass-produced blaster rifles.

“Double-cross,” he agreed. “Probably the guy who hired us for the job. Antiques dealing son of a bitch.”

“Mouth.”

“Sorry.”

“I hate that word.”

“I know,” said Kanan.

Her eyelids fluttered. Hera eased her bite; her teeth only clenched again. He tied a new tourniquet with a clean cloth from the kit, binding it tightly high on her thigh, just beneath the hem of her shorts.

“I should have caught it,” she said.

Kanan snapped gloves on. “Not your fault.”

“I arranged the job.”

“You accepted the job,” said Kanan. “And…” His jaw worked. “Look. If anyone should have noticed something, it should’ve been me.” 

He picked up the tweezers. Then, as an afterthought, he rummaged for another couple of pills to offer Hera.

“It isn’t your fault either,” Hera said, accepting the pills. She held them in her hand.

He nodded at her to take them. “This is going to hurt like hell.”

Hera considered the tweezers, poised over her thigh, and she considered Kanan, standing but bent over the table with his elbows set on either side of her leg. He had long fingers. Steady hands. He hadn’t had a drink in a year. He’d steady hands on Gorse, too. She had liked that.

All this arrived to her with a clarity she knew to be deceptive, a serenity brought about by shock, the blood loss, and the painkillers she’d already swallowed. She weighed the pills then she set them on the table. One bounced and fell off the edge.

“Well,” she said, “let’s get it over with. Be gentle.” She tried to smile.

He lowered his hand, the free one, the left, to brush at her exposed thigh. That was very gentle. The glove was smooth. She still wore her boots. The amputated trousers leg was caught on her right foot.

Kanan said, “Hold on to my shoulder,” and moved.

Stiffening as the tweezers worried into the open wound, Hera clutched at his left shoulder, as offered. Tweezers in his right hand. He flexed his arm briefly then stilled, accepting her grip. 

Kanan pulled the edges of the wound taut with the fingers and thumb of his left hand. The blood moved in her. He dug. Three expeditions. She felt the metal tweezers turning inside her leg. The slug stirred. That horrid scrape, as it twisted out of the pincers. 

At last he got it; he drew it from her. The bullet slithered out, a misshapen lump of dark iron. It was but a little stone slick with her blood and spotting red on the table. She stared at it. Kanan dropped the tweezers by the slug and peeled the gloves from his fingers.

“That’s barbaric,” she said. “People used to shoot each other with that?”

A trace smile crinkled his features. “Yeah, whatever happened to common decency? Shoot each other like civilized people.”

“Exactly,” said Hera. She put her hands on the table for balance. “Could you hand me the needle so I can stitch that up before I bleed out?”

He stabbed his thumb at his shoulder. “ _I’m_ going to stitch you up. Take that pill.”

“I’d prefer to be conscious,” she said faintly. 

Kanan looked at her. His eyes were creased, not with humor but with some bleaker feeling. Retrieving the pill he folded it into her hand.

“Just take the pill,” he said. “I’d prefer you not screaming.”

Hera closed her fingers around the painkiller.

“I’ve never screamed before,” she said.

The knowledge of that sat between them. Hera swallowed and uncurled her fingers. Rather than look at his face she looked at the pill.

He said, “Hera…” She was very tired. So lightly she thought perhaps she imagined it, Kanan touched her naked knee with his fingertips.

She slapped her palm to her mouth. Chalk, on her tongue. She tossed her head back and swallowed as a bird did a worm.

“The kolto is in the bottom tray,” Hera said, “next to the diluent. You have to mix them in equal parts before you pour it into the wound.”

“I know kolto,” said Kanan. He brushed his palm over her knee, fleetly cupping the joint in his hand. Then he pulled on a fresh pair of gloves. 

The cumulative load of the medication at last bore upon her. Muzzy, Hera blinked. He was bent over her leg with the dropper, squeezing the kolto mixture into the tunnel the slug had made. He had cleaned her skin with a wipe. Just a faint halo of dried blood remained. 

Zeb’s voice came over the comm. Hera roused. She saw the light fixture over the table. When had she laid down? She curled slightly. Her legs tensed, and Kanan put a hand on her left leg to still her. The wound was nearly closed.

“No news on any channels,” Zeb said. “Doesn’t sound like there’s any Imperial chatter at all, planet-side.”

“Set-up,” Hera whispered. “Sit tight.”

Kanan moved away from her. At the door, he depressed the speaker button and said, “Got it. We’re going to sit tight.”

“How’s the captain?”

Kanan made to rub at his eyes then stopped, mindful of the glove. “I’ll let you know when I’m done.”

“You’re doing great,” Hera assured him. “I don’t feel anything at all.” She thought. “Actually, I feel wonderful. And dizzy.” That was nice too.

Four more stitches. A fifth. He backtracked, doubling the end to better secure the thread. Then he clipped it and tied a neat knot. A medicated bacta pad over the stitches. He adhered it in place, long, curling strips of medical tape to hold each side to her skin.

“I need to set up an intravenous line,” he told her. 

His voice scratched. He was haggard, worn. Worried and for her. How silly, she thought. They were only companions. Her heart felt goose fat and very warm.

His fingers ghosted up her arm. He was probing for a vein, she thought. She had a curious sensation, like more than just his hand felt at her. 

If she hadn’t so much of the painkiller in her, and much less blood than she normally could lay claim to, Hera wouldn’t have asked it. She had remembered something she saw as a child in an old holo news reel, of a Jedi knight who had healed a man with her hands.

“Can you use the force to heal people?”

He paused, two fingers in the crook of her elbow.

“You don’t have to show me,” said Hera. “I was just curious.” She patted his hand. “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

He searched her face. His eyes were so blue, she thought, but green too. His skin so brown, nose strong, jaw slim but straight. He was very handsome; that wasn’t fair of him. 

Sometimes at night she would wake from dreams of Kanan stripping out of his sweater, his lean shoulders bending, and then setting his sturdy, steady hands on her thighs. Hera blinked rapidly again to clear her head. She was careful not to think things like that about Kanan. It was important that they stay as they were.

He said, “No. I can’t,” quietly. This was for her. It would stay with her. “Maybe if…”

“If what?” she asked. She stroked the back of his hand. His skin was so warm, and she was shivering. 

He did not linger to stroke her arm. Instead he busied setting up the bag, mixing the marked packets from the med kit, preparing the tubing and the needle, finding a rack from which to hang the bag.

“If what?”

“Do you ever give up?”

“No,” said Hera, then: “Ow.” 

The needle slid into her arm. He plugged the tubing into the bag, thick with blood substitute.

“I’m gonna get some blankets,” he said.

“I’m not sleeping in here,” she called after him. She repeated it when he returned, carrying two large thermal blankets she suspected he had taken from her quarters. 

“It’s just temporary,” said Kanan. He slung the first blanket over her. “Most Jedi find—found—their specialty when they had...” Carefully he folded the blanket beneath her. “More experience.”

“So maybe,” she said.

“Maybe.”

He sat in the booth, on the bench beside the med kit.

“I should have caught it,” Hera said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“My fault if you were hurt.”

His hand settled on her knee. “I wasn’t.”

For a time they were quiet, and she rested, beneath thought and beyond dreams. He held her knee, just to give her that.

“When I was a little girl,” Hera said from very far away, “they saved gurik kitia maat.”

He hummed. His fingers moved tenderly over her knee. He tugged a wrinkle from the blankets.

“Who did?”

“The Jedi,” she said. “They saved my family. Everything.”

Kanan was quiet again, but he did not leave her. She looked sleepily at him, across that sprawling distance, so much of it. His gaze was soft. He looked at her, too.

“Thank you,” said Hera.

“Well.” He was hoarse. His thumb brushed the curve on the inside of her knee. He withdrew his hand, to cup her hand. His fingers encircled her wrist. “You saved me first. So fair’s fair.”

Hera smiled and said, “That’s right. One good deed deserves…” She was slipping again. 

“Something like that,” he said, half-smiling in his turn.

She imagined that he bent to kiss her knuckles. What he did was turn his hand, palm beneath her palm, so that he could cover her hand with his other hand. In this way Kanan held Hera.

He said, “Lot more I owe you,” but she didn’t hear him.

*

“So… You’re probably not going to teach me how to fly any time soon, are you?”

Hera, prepping the bacta strips, glanced at Ezra. Seated on the game table with his back bowed and his head down, he looked like nothing so much as a kicked pup. 

“How’d you guess?” she asked.

His head dropped lower. He was pouting as he muttered, “Just a lucky hunch.”

Setting the prepared strips on the towel next to her on the couch, she screwed the cap on to the bacta tube and replaced it in the med kit. 

“Well,” she said, “we’ll see.”

He peered at her through his short eyelashes. His bangs were clipped by his ears with pins, to expose the thin and erratic cut the beast had gifted him. 

It hardly bled, as Ezra had pointed out, but she’d strong-armed him into compliance. Who knew what might have been in the saliva? 

“You just want to mother him,” Kanan had murmured to her. She’d elbowed him for that and he’d dodged too late, clutching at his ribs even as he grinned at her.

Ezra’s pout began slowly to invert. 

“So you might teach me how to fly?”

“I _might_ ,” she stressed. “That would depend on whether or not you behave responsibly.”

“It wasn’t my fault—”

“Passing the buck isn’t very responsible.”

He glanced away. “Not entirely my fault.”

Carefully Hera smoothed the first small bacta strip along his brow, on top of the cut. He flinched minutely. 

“You’re right,” Hera said. “It wasn’t entirely your fault.”

“But…”

“I scraped the _Phantom_ ’s underbelly,” she continued. More gently she placed the second strip beside the first, at a similar diagonal. “Of course, I never would have damaged it if you and Zeb hadn’t—”

“I know, I know.” Ezra scratched at his elbow. “And I shouldn’t have gotten distracted when we were supposed to fix it.”

“And,” said Hera, “you shouldn’t have jumped out of the _Ghost_ like that. What were you thinking?” She slapped the hand at his elbow, lightly. 

His thick eyebrows fuzzed together and he frowned, severely enough his mouth bunched his nose.

“He was thinking he wanted to show off.” Zeb was laughing loudly as he crossed through the door. “That’s what he was thinking. Wanted to be the dashing hero.”

“Oh, leave the kid alone,” said Sabine, following Zeb into the room.

Ezra’s thunderous scowl melted into a much redder thing. He looked fixedly at Hera’s right knee, though once, as Sabine settled on the far end of the couch, his bright gaze moved briefly after her.

“He did more than you did,” Sabine added.

“What he did was almost get his head bit off.”

The distraction, at least, made it so Ezra barely winced as Hera adhered the third and final strip to his forehead. She ran her palm across his brow and smiled at him, turning the pet into something practical as she plucked the pins from his hair.

“Thanks,” Ezra said. He brushed at his bangs, fussing to arrange them as he liked.

Hera flicked his nose. “No more jumping into dangerous situations. Got it?”

He rolled his eyes. “Yes, _Mom_.”

For that, she flicked his nose again. “I mean it, Ezra. You’re not as invincible as you think you are. No one is.”

Flushed, he rubbed at his nose. “It turned out okay.”

“This time.”

Zeb leaned against the back of the couch, his arms folded behind Sabine’s bare head.

“’Cause Sabine was there to save you.”

Hera pursed her lips at him. “That’s not helpful, Zeb.”

“Yeah, give it a rest.” Sabine, twisting about, punched Zeb solidly on his biceps. “I didn’t see you jumping out of the _Ghost_ for anyone.”

Ezra, yet hunched before Hera, brightened. He straightened some and brushed again at his hair, tucking it behind his ears. 

“Don’t tell me you were impressed by that move!” said Zeb.

“It was…” Sabine glanced at Ezra then lifted her chin. Steadfastly she refused to look at him again. “Cute.”

Ezra’s shoulders collapsed. At Zeb’s howl, Ezra scowled worse than ever and looked away from all of them, away even from the nonjudgmental comfort of Hera’s knee. His ears were red. 

“Knock it off, Zeb,” Sabine snapped.

“That really is enough,” Hera said, frowning at him. 

“What?” Zeb spread his hands. “She said it was cute.”

Ezra turned on the game table and hopped neatly off it. He faced none of them. 

“I was just trying to help.”

Hera reached for him. Her fingers brushed his shoulder. He jerked away from her, and her hand recoiled. Ezra took two steps toward the door then spun on his toe to look at each of them in turn; but his gaze returned to Hera.

“It’s my fault you guys were stuck there in the first place.”

“It’s no one person’s fault,” Hera told him as she stood.

Sabine muttered, “Zeb,” and Zeb coughed and rubbed at his nape.

“Eh, I might not have done everything I should have done either.”

Once more Hera to Ezra. He let her grasp his arm. His chin was tucked to his throat; his hair hung before his eyes.

“But now that you know what you did wrong, you won’t make that mistake again.”

“I didn’t want you to get hurt.” He mumbled it. “Especially since you shouldn’t have been stuck there anyway.”

Sabine shrugged. “What’s a couple bruises? Scars help with the advertising. Where you messed up—and you totally messed up—is you didn’t think how it would make me—” She flustered. “ _Us_ feel if you really got hurt.” Looking sidelong at Ezra, she tugged at her wrist guard. “You can be brave but don’t be stupid too.”

“Advice we should all take,” said Hera, eyeing Zeb.

“Who’s giving advice?” 

Kanan wandered into the common room with a steaming mug in hand. As he moved to take up position next to Hera, he offered the mug to Ezra. 

“Cocoa. Drink it.”

“What’s cocoa?”

“Just drink it,” said Kanan. “Don’t argue with me about everything.”

“Sabine’s giving advice,” Hera told him. “And it’s pretty good.”

“I always give good advice,” Sabine said. “Like how you should trust me. See? That was good advice, too.”

“We trust you,” Kanan said as he poked Ezra’s forehead, short of the bandages. “C’mon. It’s not going to spit on you.”

Not at Kanan, but at Hera: Sabine smiled, just a little turn of her mouth.

“I know,” said Sabine.

“But what is it? Is it medicine?”

“It’s just cocoa! Look—I’ll give it to Hera if you don’t want it. She deserves it more.”

“I’m drinking it,” Ezra said quickly, and he took a huge mouthful of it. His eyes immediately bugged. Gasping, Ezra spat the cocoa back into the mug. “Hot!”

Sabine started to giggle. “Did the steam not tip you off?”

“Really hot! Hot! I burned my mouth!” He massaged his lips with the root of his palm.

“You’re such a baby!” Sabine rose abruptly and gestured with her fingers, _gimme_. “Let me have it.”

Ezra turned, shielding the hot mug to his chest. “No. It’s mine.” He spoke carefully, with an exaggerated lisp.

“Give it!”

“He spat in it,” said Zeb. 

“You’re a baby, too,” said Sabine. She vaulted over the game table after Ezra.

“Kids,” Hera called, “don’t break anything.”

“This is what you missed,” said Kanan as he plopped down on the couch. He threw his arms along the back of the couch. “While you were down there fighting off the ravening hordes, I was stuck wrangling the real monsters.”

“Poor darling,” said Hera. She sat next to him, the warmth of his arm at her nape. Only her left lek brushed against him. “Maybe I should make you some cocoa. I know how much you like it.”

He laughed in his throat. “Sounds like a bribe. I should probably say no. A Jedi wants not these things.”

Hera studied him. How casually he’d said it: Jedi. His cheek was creased with a smile, lopsided. A loosened hank of dark hair curled, just the end of it held by his hair tie. If she fit her finger to the loop she could easily draw the hair free.

“It’s just cocoa,” she said. “No sinister ulterior motives, I promise.”

“Nothing sinister, maybe,” he said. 

She pressed her knee to his knee. The kids were yelling in the corridor. What a marvel that Sabine could still act as a teenager ought. Hera had outgrown her own childhood well before she was sixteen. 

Nothing youthful in the way Kanan covered her knee with his hand, how, in their solitude in the common room, he let his arm slide from the couch to her shoulders. Her heart thumped loudly twice. She thought perhaps he would kiss her. Hera set her hand over his heart, to push him away or maybe to hold him.

He drew her near to him and briefly, he laid his cheek on top of her head. The flight cap obscured the heat of his skin, the itch of his beard, the particular cast of his cheekbones. 

The ribbing of his sweater was thick. She curled her fingers into it. The pace of his heart was against her palm.

Was this how young lovers would play at their game? Never had Hera perceived her self as young, and they were not lovers.

She set her cheek to his shoulder. Beside her, Kanan sighed. His fingers splayed along her arm.

He said, “Hera,” throaty. He would say something else after that. She heard it in that fleeting hesitation to speak more, the shaping of her name in his mouth and the lowness of it, as of a thing made reverent.

Before he could say it, Hera slipped out from under his chin. Her heart was wild and half-sick. She smiled and cocked her head. Tchun and tchin shivered. They were not lovers, and this was not love. 

Kanan looked at her. His eyes were lined, just so at the corners. Those lines had not always been there. She had watched as they came quietly over the years. He was watching too. His hand at her knee did not clasp. He was looking at her as though he were waiting for one of them to say it.

She stroked his chest with her fingers, caressed him with her palm. A distance now; she kept it.

“Still want that tour?” she asked him.

*

The first, of course, was an accident. She hadn’t meant for it to happen. Nor had Kanan intended for it.

The mission was a routine smuggling operation and not a particularly thrilling one. The local moff of a Middle Rim sector had raised tariffs for suppliers on home goods, and a business in the sector was willing to pay original retail plus another ten percent for six gross scented candles. 

“Why candles?” bemoaned Zeb. He’d taken to wearing a rag around his face. Leaning into the bridge, he squinted wetly at Hera. “Another whiff of that lilac rubbish and I’ll blow my brains out my nose.”

Kanan clapped Zeb on the shoulder. This was violence enough to shock a sneeze out of Zeb. 

“Better to run candles than guns. What imperial could suspect nefarious intent in ‘Dreaming Weather’?”

“Don’t get too relaxed,” Hera warned Kanan. “If there’s one thing the empire loves, it’s money.”

“Hard not to relax.” He settled into the front-most passenger’s seat and kicked his feet up on the dash. His thighs tensed then eased. “That sweet smell of autumn leaves rotting in the dirt lulls me to sleep.”

“Boots down.”

Still grinning, Kanan sat straighter with his long legs crossed before him. He swiveled idly in the seat. He slouched some to the side, with his chest bent and his hips open. As he turned the chair on its joint, he rubbed the fingers of his left hand along his thumb.

“Sorry, captain. Didn’t mean to get mud all over your baby.”

Hera petted the console and murmured, “Don’t worry, my love. Mama won’t let that dirty scoundrel rough you up.”

“I thought you liked roughing up,” said Kanan slyly. 

She arched her brow as she looked at Kanan over her outstretched arm. The curl of his smile creased the skin around his nose. Without heat, he was teasing. Hera, too, smiled.

“Not in front of the baby, darling.” 

“I’ll try to watch my mouth.”

“Your mouth?” She feigned surprise. “I’m only worried about your tongue.”

Kanan laughed out loud at that. An infrequent thing with Kanan, more and more those days. The longer they traveled together the less he played the gadfly. 

Hera brushed some small trace of dust from the console and resumed tinkering with the flight route. The low, husking warmth of his laugh lingered between her lekku, in the delicate swell where the nerves joined.

“You want I should get you two some candles, to help with the mood?”

Kanan pushed the chair about with his heel on the floor, to face Zeb. “What mood is that?”

“Between the candles and your flirting,” Zeb said, “I’m gonna be sick.”

“Don’t you dare,” said Hera sharply. “If you’re going to vomit then you can do it out the hatch.”

“Let the cold vacuum take you,” said Kanan. “You know better than to rough up Hera’s baby.”

“‘Flirting,’” Hera muttered. “‘Mood.’ I mean it, Zeb! Don’t you dare throw up on the _Ghost_ ’s floor!”

“You’re real vicious when it comes to the _Ghost_ ,” said Kanan, “you know that?”

“I look after my baby.”

“And your baby looks after you.”

“No flirting,” said Hera, wagging her finger at Kanan.

“Who’s flirting?”

“You’re flirting.”

The very portrait of innocence, Kanan flattened his hand over his breast. “I’m much too practical to flirt with you.” He paused. “At least, seriously.”

A joke, but nonetheless true. All for the best that they had come to their understanding long ago, when Kanan had shown up at the hangar on Gorse with a single duffel bag slung over his shoulder and the truth of what he was known between them.

“Be a dear,” said Hera lightly, “and check on that shipping manifest. We don’t want any prying customs guards.”

“Aye, aye,” said Kanan, and he rose with swaying hips and loose shoulders to follow her command.

“If they want the candles,” Zeb said from the corridor, “let ‘em take ‘em.”

The customs guard approved the shipping manifest without inspecting the _Ghost_ , tagged as a merchant ship. Nor did the business owner choose to cause fuss. As Kanan reported it, she paid as promised and suggested an effective over the counter decongestant for Zeb.

“Poor sweet,” said the woman (a Sullastan, Kanan said, like Zaluna) cozily. She’d eyed Zeb’s biceps with interest. “Will you be looking for a place to say?”

As he often did when faced with clear interest from women, Zeb coughed into his fist and feigned illness. He’d an edge that day, courtesy his very real allergies, but Kanan (said Zeb, as Hera stitched the deep gash in Kanan’s shoulder with steady hands) rolled his eyes as was customary. 

Both Zeb and Kanan were calm about the debacle. Hera was as calm if not more so.

“You need to just tell them you’re not interested in women,” Kanan had told Zeb. They took the shortcut to the pharmacy the woman had suggested, a walk down a short and narrow street between the back sides of two rows of shops.

“Well, I don’t want to let ‘em down too hard.”

“Since when have you cared about being gentle?”

That was when the gang had jumped them: three at one end of the street and two at the other.

“Muggers did this?” Hera asked with polite disbelief.

Blood had matted in Kanan’s eyebrow, transferred there by his hand at some point. The bloodied prints from his fingers had smeared. They were a virulent, dark red against his brown skin.

Zeb scratched his shoulder. “Well…”

“Not muggers. Have a little faith in me,” said Kanan.

Hera tugged the thread tight. Wincing minutely, Kanan then stilled.

The group had recognized Zeb from an old imperial bulletin about renegade Lasat: dangerous criminal elements, the capture of which might net any one person a hefty purse. Split between five opportunists the purse would still prove substantial.

If Zeb had not been ill, perhaps the man who got Kanan in the back could not have done so. Zeb was ill. If Kanan had brought his blaster, perhaps he might have got the man before he got Kanan. The local laws were very strict about carrying blasters. 

The decongestant worked swiftly. Bleary, Zeb retired. Four hours after they had returned to the _Ghost_ , Kanan grim-set and Zeb with his arm around Kanan’s shoulders, Hera changed the bacta strip for Kanan in his room. 

She roused him for it. He’d gone to bed shirtless and sockless with his hair still tied. She offered him a clip; he took it and—yawning—pivoted to give her his back.

“I can do that.”

“Not on your own back.”

He was quiet as she peeled the first medicated strip from his skin, quiet and at ease. The brine stink of the bacta mixed with the lingering odor of dried blood and the antiseptic cream. Beneath all of this the sick sweet smell of the candles remained.

“I’ve done it before,” he said.

Hera folded the used strip into neat quarter and pocketed it to toss later. His hair, faintly kinky and a darker brown than his dark skin, was pinned up along the curve of his head. With the scissors she measured a new strip then cut it off the roll. The edge was tidy.

“How did they get the jump on you?”

He scrubbed at his face with both hands. His naked back curved as he sighed.

“I wasn’t paying attention.” He shrugged, careful only to shrug the one shoulder. “It could have been worse.”

The gash ran diagonal across the left side of his back, starting an inch shy of his spine and dashing across the shoulder blade. He had three black moles, two small and one smaller, dotted in the hollow between the fifth and sixth ribs on the right side. A fourth mole showed at the small of his back when he bent forward; a birthmark exposed only then, as a gap was made between his waist and the mouth of his trousers.

Hera smoothed the bacta strip over the stitched wound, and then she taped it into place. Her hands were clean. She had washed the blood off them. Blood came easily off skin, easier than the thick grease needed to tend to Chopper’s workings.

Kanan shifted. He turned in the silent space of his quarters to look at her across his bandaged shoulder. In the shallow light his eyes appeared a bleaker shade of blue. 

What could she say to him? Be more careful. Pay better attention. No things he did not already know. Death loomed. For Kanan perhaps it always loomed. For each of them death gave this waiting certainty. 

Once every few months Hera would wake with the remembered burn of smoke in her nose and her mouth, and the great groan the second floor of her family’s house had made as it collapsed into the first floor, and the fire light gleaming on the white helmets of the soldiers who blocked the street so that all the clan’s houses burned. 

He brushed the back of her hand with his finger. Not once did his eyes leave her. Softly Kanan said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” said Hera.

He touched her hand again. Kanan smiled at her. No tease in that. His finger moved gently across her skin. His smile was tired. He gave it anyway.

She had no reason to do it. They had survived worse. They’d survived Gorse. The mission was behind them now, the _Ghost_ in hyperspace. 

Hera raised her hand—the hand he did not pet—and rested her fingertips on his chin. His beard was coarse. Hair was ever coarse to Hera. But for eyelashes, Twi’lek had no hair. His finger as he stroked her was callused. Her hands were as rough.

He said, “So what’s the prognosis, doc?” 

She traced the underside of his chin. His eyes dropped. He cupped her hand, at her side. Hera withdrew.

“You’ll be fine. But I need to change that bandage.”

“Four hours?” She nodded. He rubbed at his face again with his palms, scruffing his beard and his brows. “I’ll be awake.”

He carded fingers through his hair. The clip loosened. He picked it free and, as the small tail of hair fell, reached to pull the tie out. His back, broad and bare. The bandage was starkly white against his skin. Still, the brittle stink of blood.

Two years ago when they were yet acquaintances on Gorse, he would have joked that she only wanted to get the shirt off him. He was a flirt by nature. Serious, but a flirt. Then he came aboard the _Ghost_ at her invitation without question of the line she held.

In that first week together, far from Gorse and the dead of Gorse and her silver moon, Hera took Kanan aside and explained why the line was there. He agreed absolutely. She offered her hand and he shook it, and then he’d grinned at her and said, “So no falling in love with me either,” and Hera said, “I’ll do my very best to resist.”

As Kanan slipped the flexible hair tie around his wrist, Hera crossed the floor to him. The distance was not so great. Three small steps and she touched his shoulder. He glanced curiously at her. His skin was warm. He’d a smattering of freckles along his biceps.

She would wonder later what she had thought. Had she even once thought: Don’t do this—? If she had, would she have listened? What she remembered was that his arm had sixteen black freckles, and when she kissed him his biceps tightened beneath her hand.

Her lips rounded. She drew gently on his lower lip, feeling—a moment—the implicit heat of his mouth in the little startled motion of his lips.

He looked searchingly at her as she settled on her heels. Very lightly she ran her hand down his tensed arm. Fractionally the musculature there relaxed.

“You’re sure,” said Kanan.

“Yes,” said Hera.

He did not reach for her yet. Slowly he shook his head.

“If we do this—”

“I know.”

“We can’t take it back.”

“I know,” she said again.

He rolled his lips in. Slicker, they rolled out. He glanced once at the wall behind her but inexorably his gaze returned to her. His brow was creased. She wanted to kiss the line between his eyes, above his strong nose. Rising on her toes Hera did kiss him there.

He said, “Hera. You’re sure?”

She said, “I am,” and she pressed her mouth to his. 

Yet he would not respond, not fully. His lips softened; he returned her kisses vaguely. His hands hung in the air, far from her.

Hera said, “Do you want this?” and considered him. If she was alone in this then she would turn and leave. She would not push him into something he did not want.

His eyelids fluttered. His eyes were closed. She heard him drawing breath through his nose. Then very shyly his hands settled on her hips.

He said, “Yes,” and his arms encircled her, his hands palming her back, and when she pulled at his nape—when she pulled him to her—he came without argument or complaint. 

What was testing changed. Somewhere in the warmth of his mouth or the angle of hers the shape of the thing shifted. She caught his lip between her teeth. His beard scratched her skin. Her fingers dug into his shoulders and he groaned from pain or want or both. He nuzzled her throat and his hands came up to cup her head. 

Hera said, “Please—” and she hooked her fingers in his belt loops and hauled him flush to her. Kanan planted his feet wide. His hips tipped. She sat heavily on his bed, narrowly avoiding clocking her head on the top bunk.

He asked with genuine confusion, “How the hell do you get your overalls on every day?”

She pulled again and he collapsed half against her. His hands braced to either side of her. The breadth of him cut out the light. In the shadow of the top bunk he was masked. Perhaps she was so, too. The bacta brine smell cloyed. 

“Zippers in the back,” she said against his clavicle, “and on the sides.”

He fumbled with one hand at the small of her back. Unable to resist, Hera wiggled and arched to press her hips to his. The hardness of him was unmistakeable. Kanan’s arm—the arm on which he was propped—bent at the elbow. He swore, and Hera smothered her laughing in a series of fleeting kisses brushed across his right shoulder. 

“Real sweet of you,” said Kanan, “laughing at an injured man.”

She curled her finger around his chin. Her trimmed nail scratched through his beard, and Kanan paused in his struggle with her zipper to look at her.

“Poor baby,” Hera murmured. “Want me to kiss and make it better?”

His head fell to her shoulder. He groaned again and rocked his hips, strongly enough she startled. Her hands hooked behind his nape. At last he’d found the zipper at her back.

“Don’t say things like that.”

“Like what?”

“In that voice.”

“What voice?” she asked, bewildered.

“Your voice,” he said, as grouchily as he might ask why Hera in all her graciousness had seen fit to leave no caf for the rest of the crew.

That was the moment when Hera thought: Don’t do this. She wound her fingers in his unbound hair and tilted her chin up to kiss him hotly. 

At night Hera slept on her side or on her belly. Her lekku necessitated this. Too thick and too sensitive for her to sleep on them, they also would not allow her to lie beneath him. The injury in his back, however anesthetized by the bacta, meant he could not lie beneath her. They considered neither of these. There wasn’t time to think of it.

Their clothes were opened; not off. When Kanan pushed into her, Hera gasped and arched without thought. He was braced with one hand, fingers spread wide across the mattress; the other arm closed tightly around her back. Her breath was stuck in her throat. She was ready—not ready enough—a very long time since anything had last stretched her like this. He filled her slowly, and Hera said, “Touch—please, touch me right now.”

“Bossy,” Kanan panted. He shifted, bringing his arm around to her front. As he did so Hera braced her self with her own arm.

“Not there—”

His fingers stopped short of her groin. Experimentally he was moving, withdrawing only slightly then slipping deeper.

“Then—tell me where. Where do you want me?”

“Tchun-tchin.” 

He was very hot inside her; he was very large. He moved again and Hera thought, she needed more of what he might give.

Kanan’s face squinched. “Where?”

“Head,” she said, “ _now_ ,” and she took his hand and brought it to tchin, her right lek. 

His brow lifted; his eyes lidded. “O-o-o-o-oh,” said Kanan, now very cunning. His palm shaped to the fat root of the lek. He was content then to move shallowly into her.

“You’re stalling.”

“Oh?” He trickled his fingers, stroking the sensitive skin there at her head. “I am?”

“Don’t tease.”

“Am I?” 

Then he scraped the rough pad of his thumb along the underside of her lek. Frisson sparked. Each miniscule catch in his skin seemed to drag over her. Hera pinched her lips and rocked against Kanan. The angle was too slight, too wrong. The small of her back was cramping. 

He slid his hand to cup her nape and tugged her so that he might press his lips and teeth to the crease at the base of tchin. Whatever urgency had consumed him had eased. Now he was lingering, spotting little, soft kisses that sharpened with teeth. Snatching at his hair with one hand, Hera found her breath shortening. Still he moved incrementally, thick inside of her, his hips ever against her hips. 

“If your lekku are so sensitive,” he asked her, his teeth harsh, “does it drive you wild wearing that head gear all day?”

Hera snorted. “Does underwear drive you wild?”

She felt his lips curling. He said huskily, “That’s not what drives me wild, Captain Hera.”

Her gut was fluttering. Kanan. She was fucking Kanan. In the sudden tenderness of his hands and his mouth as he turned to kiss tchun, the left lek, Hera realized this. She was fucking _Kanan_. 

What did it mean? Nothing, she thought. Nothing. It meant nothing. 

Kanan’s cock was stretching her; his bare chest with its black curls filled the spaces of the bunk; he was saying into her ear, in his low voice, “Hera. Hera. I want—” like he had said, “We can’t take it back.”

She surged. Her teeth caught on his lips. His nose mashed upon her cheek. Hera, grappling, struck his left shoulder by accident and Kanan swore and twisted—his teeth flashing as he recoiled in pain—and she had room enough to grab his belt loops, at his thighs, and thrust her self on him. He swore again and bucked. His knees cracked on the bunk.

Kanan dropped his head to her shoulder; he felt for her lekku. At last they were simply fucking. She squeezed her eyes shut as tightly as she could. He had no shape against her eyelids. Pleasure came readily as she arced to meet him, as he petted her lekku with his long, dark fingers. 

She thought of nothing. She tried to, but this was Kanan’s breath on her lips. His short beard rasping over her sleek jaw as he tongued her ear. She clutched at the tucked blanket and moved more quickly against him. 

Again he slowed to kiss her cheek, her nose, her trembling throat. With her nails in his nape she urged him on. Each time he slowed the smell of blood and brine and his sweat clawed at her. She was thinking, without wanting to think of it, of Kanan clutching at Zeb’s waist and the blood that had collected on his boots. 

Her back ached. His left shoulder was stiff. She was increasingly sore between her legs though the emptying sweetness of her lekku as he stroked them countered the promised chafe. No romance to it. That was fine. Hera kissed him constantly, that he could not speak to her. She was afraid of what he might say or what it might mean if he said it.

Near to the end of it, Kanan shifted and clutched her thighs, to tip her so he might shove more fully into her. The mechanics of her one small orgasm were clear and neatly met soon after that. He was not unfamiliar with sex, and Hera was not unfamiliar with her body. Fiercer orgasms had gripped her in the past but this slow ripple—like the relaxing of a knotted muscle—slipped pleasantly through her. She welcomed it. 

Hera broke the kiss to sigh over his cheek. She was tightening, little convulsions, about him, and that was welcome too. Some hotter thing could be glimpsed on the far side, but she wouldn’t chase it. Languidly she petted his bandaged back and leaned into him. Her lips were at his stubbled jaw.

“You’re holding out on me.”

“Didn’t mean to,” he said.

His orgasm moved swiftly. Kanan stiffened; he shoved forcefully twice then held her closely to him. Her fingers moved through his hair. Hera kissed his temple and brushed the hair behind his ears as his breathing quieted.

He lifted his head from her shoulder. Half-turned to the light, his eyes showed their usual greenish-blue. With his breath still steadying, her breath too, he was again searching her. 

“You need to rest,” said Hera. She moved from under him; he was out of her and then beside her.

Kanan said, “Yeah.” He clambered onto the bed and made to kick his trousers off. A grimace passed over his face. The pain held him briefly hunched. He’d sweat in the hair of his chest.

Fixing her second zipper first, Hera turned and helped him finish undressing. His arm shifted; he laid it over his lap. Curiously modest of him, when periodically another small tremor tightened in her; she was grateful for it.

“Stay off of your back. I don’t want to have to patch you up again.”

“Off my back,” said Kanan. He was watching her as she folded the trousers in half then cast them on the top bunk. “Got it.”

The air was cool. Her naked lekku were as electrified: her skin yet buzzed. She hadn’t fixed the zipper on her right hip. Turning from him, Hera pulled the zip up without fumbling.

He spoke as she neared the closed door.

“You could stay.”

She was motionless at the door for a passing moment. Then she raised her eyes to him. He was carefully blank in his consideration of her, his features marshaled into unpresuming tranquility. The black of his hair curled at his ears and his neck.

“This won’t happen again,” Hera said.

His eyelashes were short. They moved across his eyes; he blinked, as calm as Hera. He nodded.

“All right,” said Kanan.

She remained at the threshold.

“Get some rest,” she told him. “I’ll see you in four hours.”

“All right.” His arm was without tension, cast before his crotch. “I’ll be here.”

“Good night,” said Hera.

“Yeah,” said Kanan.

She pressed the door release and stepped into the corridor. The door whisked shut behind her. The ghost of the scented candles was momentarily overwhelming. Hera set her hand on the door and breathed harshly through her mouth.

They had the money. Kanan would heal. The mission had not proved an absolute fiasco.

At the far end of the corridor, where it intersected the y axis corridor, Chopper paused to whistle at her.

She straightened. “It’s nothing.”

He clicked twice then made a flatulent sound. Hera scowled.

“Go back to work, Chopper,” she said.

His dome was twisting, a mocking approximation of a shaken head. He made several more _blaats_ and topped it off with a sliding whistle that started high then ended shortly. 

“Mind your own business,” said Hera. She passed him in the hall. “And besides, it won’t happen again.”

Chopper clucked and then pottered away, wafting one of his small arms in blunt dismissal. At least he would say nothing of this to anyone. She could hope Zeb’s nose was too stuffed to catch some trace.

She would shower and set her chrono for four hours to change Kanan’s bandage. Somewhere safe: the kitchen. This would remain nothing more than what it was, a singular instance.

*

“You heading out?”

Hera lifted her eyes from her boot laces. In the meager dawn light Kanan trotted up the hatch. Ezra, wheezing, followed. Both were dressed thinly given the usual chill of Lothal’s early mornings, though the sweat slicking Kanan’s throat and the redness of Ezra’s cheeks would have her doubting the _Ghost_ ’s data.

“I need some equipment to work on the _Phantom_. Are you okay?” she asked Ezra. 

Bent over with his hands on his knees, he shook his head. 

“He’s fine,” said Kanan.

“I’m dying,” said Ezra.

“You’re out of shape.”

Groaning, Ezra dropped stiffly to his knees then proceeded from there to lay out on his front on the hatch. He pressed first his left cheek then his right to the cold metal.

“I was at. The Imperial Academy. For a month. I’m in. Great shape.” He huffed like a bellows. “You’re just. A tyrant.”

“Yeah,” said Kanan, “I’m a real dictator. Well, hang around and I’ll go with you.”

Hera propped her hands on her knee and tipped her face to him. “I just need to get a few things.”

“Me too. Kitchen’s pretty bare. Somebody’s been snacking.”

“Not me,” Ezra said. “Just got back.”

“Never said it was you.”

Brushing her trousers clean, as if they needed it, Hera stood. She shook her lekku behind her shoulders.

“Well, will it take you long?” 

“To get ready?” Kanan cut his hand through the air. Absently he plucked at the front of his white shirt, peeling the fabric from his chest. “Nah. Just need to shower. Unless you want me to go as is.” 

He leaned in, and Hera threw her hands into a bold X between them. 

“Shower,” said Hera.

Grinning, he receded. “You know, some people like the smell of sweat.”

“I don’t,” she said with conviction.

“All right. I’ll take a shower,” said Kanan, his voice warm with the unspoken laugh. His eyes creased. Awful daring of him to wink at her with Ezra at their feet, moaning that this was it for him; he was a goner.

“C’mon,” Kanan said. “Get up. Let that sweat cool, then you’ll be in trouble.”

Crossing his eyes as he did so, Ezra rolled onto his back then made a show of struggling to sit upright. Once he was seated, though, the fatigue dropped from him, and he looked with interest at Hera.

“Hey, can I go with you guys?”

“Thought you were dying,” said Kanan.

“Eh,” said Ezra. “It passed.”

“I was really just going out and coming right back,” Hera said.

“What,” said Kanan, “you got something else to do?”

Ezra stuck his lower lip out. “I’m so tired of being stuck, in places, with walls. The market would be great for a growing boy like me.”

“Don’t lay it on so thick, kid,” Kanan muttered.

“What, are you going to report me to Hera?”

Hera glanced across the prairie at the distant shadow of the near city, rising ill-defined through Lothal’s constant dust. She thought of wandering at a pace she set through the market, tinkering in shops and at stalls. Sighing, Hera let that other morning go.

“You have a half hour,” she said, pointing sternly at Kanan. “Then I’m leaving both of you behind.”

His eyes crossed as he looked at her fingertip. “Why are you pointing at me?”

“Because this is your fault,” said Hera. She pushed forward to tap the end of his nose.

“My fault?” His brow arched. He was smiling again. It wasn’t at all fair for him to smile like that. “What did I do?”

Ezra was smiling too as he looked between them. “So I can come?”

“Why not?” Hera turned her gesture into one of apathy: her fingers arched to pinch and her palm turned up. “Ask Zeb if he wants to come, too. But take a shower first, Ezra. I mean it!”

“Don’t worry,” Ezra said, scrambling to his feet, “there’s no way he’ll smell better than me. I got dibs!”

“Don’t leave your towel on the floor,” Kanan shouted after him.

“Mm.” Hera tilted her head near to Kanan’s shoulder that she might whisper, “He’s not listening.”

Kanan hitched his thumbs in his runner’s shorts. “I’ve noticed. He likes to not do that.”

“Definitely not something I’m used to dealing with.”

Kanan shrugged an eyebrow. He, too, tilted, toward Hera. “Zeb’s getting better.”

“I wasn’t talking about Zeb.”

“I’ll pick up the kid’s towel,” said Kanan.

Hera crossed her arms and glanced archly at him. Her finger tapped against her elbow.

“I wasn’t talking about Ezra either.”

“Huh,” said Kanan vaguely. “Sounds like a mystery.” His eyelids lowered then rose slightly; he too could be arch. The lopsided draw of his mouth sharpened. 

Leaning closer yet he murmured, “I never said good morning, by the way.”

She got her hand up just in time to block him from kissing her cheek. His lips parted as he laughed. The heat of his breath rolled across her palm; his beard tickled her wrist. Hera shoved him away.

“You’re filthy.”

“Good morning,” said Kanan.

“Go inside,” said Hera.

He moved, ever obedient. “I’m going.”

“Take a shower.”

“When the kid’s done.”

“And have some discretion,” she yelled.

“I’m not listening!”

She wiped her palm on her thigh and worked to steady her breath. Holding it to the count of ten she exhaled. Briefly Hera looked up to the canopy overhead; but of course the hatch was situated beneath the bridge. Even if someone were awake and tooling about on the bridge they wouldn’t have seen that little act.

Her chest was tight, oddly so. Hera rubbed at her throat with her hand then went into the _Ghost_.

Zeb agreed. “Could use some excitement. We’ve been sitting around all day. Thought I was about to go out of my head.”

A newly cleaned Ezra sat perched on top of the game table with his wet hair a knotted nest. He was picking at a plate of chewy bread, the remnants of Kanan’s Monday baking.

“Thought you already were.” Ezra swallowed and clarified, “Out of your head.”

“Please don’t kill each other,” Hera said as she left them to it. 

Hera rapped at Sabine’s door and called to ask if she wanted to go with them to the market. No reply was forthcoming. If Sabine woke to find the rest of the crew gone… She likely wouldn’t care. 

Hera unlocked the door and palmed it open. A shaft of light fell across Sabine’s face. Her nose wrinkled; she rolled away.

“Sabine.”

“No.”

“We’re going to the market,” Hera called softly. “Do you want to come with?” 

“U-u-u-ugh,” Sabine said. She pulled the sheet over her head and curled. “Ask again never. I’m sleeping.”

Quietly Hera left her.

Kanan had vacated the shared wash room to join Zeb and Ezra in the common area. He at least had combed his hair before tying it in its customary position. As he buckled his shoulder armor, he glanced at Hera.

“What did Sabine say?”

“Let me guess,” Zeb interrupted. “We’re all savages for waking up before the crack of noon.”

“That’s pretty much exactly what she said.” Hera thought. “Though not in those exact words. Or really any of them.”

Ezra fell backwards on the game table and said, “Can we go already?” His plate was abandoned on the floor beneath the table.

“Are you going to fuss the whole time?” Zeb asked.

“Are you?”

“I don’t fuss, brat.”

“Well, neither do I.”

“Isn’t it great to see the boys getting along?” Hera asked Kanan.

“Yeah,” he said, “it’s heartwarming. Really makes me feel like that’s.” He circled his hand lazily in the air. “Happening.”

“Your heart warming?”

“Probably just indigestion,” he said.

“Mm, probably,” said Hera, and Kanan looked away, too late to hide his grin.

The boys were getting along, in their fashion. As they set off for the town, this mostly involved Zeb slinging his arm about Ezra to drag him near, that Zeb could scour Ezra’s head with his knuckles, and Ezra firing off as many insults as he could come up with in the time it took him to break free. 

“Why does Zeb have to come anyway?” Ezra demanded, coming about beside Hera. 

“To keep you from doing something stupid,” Zeb retorted from Kanan’s far side. 

Kanan flicked a look at Zeb that suggested Zeb take a couple steps out of Kanan’s space. Zeb ignored the look and the suggestion.

“Me?” Ezra jogged ahead and pivoted on his heel so that he walked quickly backwards on his toes. “You’re the one who stole the TIE.”

“And saved your neck.”

“Only so we were even.”

“That’s how it works,” said Zeb, “one good deed cancels another.”

Kanan eyed Zeb. “That’s… not how that phrase goes.”

“Well, then how does it go?”

“One good deed means you’re going to lord it over my head forever,” Ezra said.

“That’s also not how it goes,” said Kanan.

“Oh, come off it,” Zeb blustered. “You were lording it over my head.”

“Turn around before you trip over a mouse hole,” Hera said to Ezra, who pivoted again and fell in step with her. “And anyway, you two did destroy that TIE. So that’s one less fighter on Lothal.”

Kanan puffed through his nose. Her shadow as she looked to Kanan intersected with his; her lekku fell into the dark space made by his shoulder.

“Millions of credits to replace it,” said Kanan with slow, mean satisfaction. His lips curled as slowly, as meanly. He turned his grin to Hera and his voice dropped. “Pilot censured. Maybe even drummed out.”

“What, is that supposed to turn me on?” she did not say, though she threw him a look for his tone and did say, “We should be so lucky.”

“You don’t think they would have kicked ‘em out for that?”

“It’s usually nepotism that gets them the TIE slot,” said Hera.

“Ah,” said Kanan. “Rich kids and nobles.”

“Pretty much,” said Ezra. “The rich kids were the worst. ‘Oh, my father’s so proud of my enlistment. He’s going to pay for my commission as an officer, and then I’ll be a pilot. Oo-hoo-hoo-hoo.’”

“Dead-on impression, kid,” said Zeb.

“Oh, thank you, sir,” said Ezra, bowing lowly at the waist as they came to the scattered and abandoned outskirts of the city. “I’m just grateful you acknowledged me, sir. Please, would you like me to lick your boots, sir?”

“My boots could use a good scrubbing.”

“Well, you’ve got a tongue,” Ezra retorted, straightening. “Scrub ‘em yourself.”

“Scrub your mouth out.”

“It’s so nice that they get along,” Kanan said dryly to Hera. 

If he meant to tease, she chose not to engage. Ezra was making faces at Zeb around her back.

“This _is_ getting along,” she said. “For them. I’ll take the kid?”

Kanan rounded his eyes and tucked his chin. “You don’t want to wander the market with the old man?”

“Stop wobbling your lip,” Hera said, amused. “It’s not going to work on me.”

“Worth a shot,” said Kanan, dropping the guise. “Which kid you want?”

“I’ll be generous. You can take the troublemaker.”

“All right,” Kanan said, snagging Zeb’s arm. “You’re with me.”

“Oi!”

“Smell you later, troublemaker!” Ezra said cheerfully. He waved both his arms till Kanan and Zeb had turned the corner, Kanan frog-marching Zeb forward. Just before the corner, Zeb threw an especially vulgar hand gesture at Ezra.

Ezra gasped in outrage. “Did you see that?”

“See what?” Hera pretended to crane about, looking for some sign. She shielded her eyes with her hand. No need for that; the sun was well-hid by clouds.

“The thing Zeb did with his hand!”

“What did he do?”

Ezra folded his arms over his chest and tucked his hands to his armpits. His mouth worked. 

“Well, I’m not going to do it.”

“Then you’re not as easy to trick as I thought you were,” said Hera. She dropped her hand between his shoulders and urged him on. “Now pick up the pace, slowpoke.”

In truth she needed little for either the _Ghost_ or the _Phantom_. The town was small, much of its sprawling outskirts abandoned in the aftermath of some long ago drought, and the market was proportional.

“You’re not going to find anything good.”

“You’d be surprised,” said Hera. She ducked through the beaded entryway to a large junk stall and held the strands high so Ezra could pass through too. “Sometimes you can find a real treasure, if you take the time to look.”

“In this junk?”

The man running the stall scowled at Ezra. Stepping so that her shoulders blocked Ezra off from the man’s sight, Hera beamed at him. The scowl softened. 

“Anything special?”

“Ah.” The man squirmed. “Just the usual.”

Safe in Hera’s shadow, Ezra rolled his eyes and whispered, “See?”

“Then I’ll just take a look for myself,” Hera said, continuing to smile. “I’m sure I’ll find something.”

His hand rose. “Take your time.”

Ezra went on whispering. “It’s still just junk.”

“You’re right. Most of it is.” Hera tapped the back of two fingers to Ezra’s shoulder then gestured with her chin. “But tell me what you see on that table.”

He squinted. “Junk.”

Hera laughed and tapped his cheek in passing. “Keep looking.”

Frowning, Ezra moved to the table, and Hera dug in to the double-wide bookcase at the back of the stall. Ezra’s assessment _was_ largely on point; nothing in the bookcase was worth even the first glance. 

Ezra she glanced at, too: his frown had faded to interest, and Ezra was sorting methodically through the table’s unorganized heaps. She wandered to him.

“Find anything yet?”

“A few Corellian d-weight couplers,” he said absently. He turned one, a pot-bellied joint ringed at an end, over in his hands.

“That could be useful,” Hera said.

“If the _Ghost_ was a pod-racer.”

Hera watched as he chewed at his lip. “You know your engines. I’m impressed.”

She had thought he’d preen. Instead Ezra hitched his shoulders and said, “Not as much as you do,” almost shyly.

He was human, or at least half-human. The vibrancy of his eyes, she always thought; but perhaps humans could have purple eyes. Certainly Ezra was no Twi’lek. He had no child’s lekku draped over his shoulder, that she might brush with her own as long ago her mother had brushed hers.

Very lightly Hera touched his cheek again, now with her thumb.

“It comes with the territory. For a dust baby, you know a lot.”

Pleased, Ezra ducked his head. 

“What did you see on the table anyway?”

Her smile flashed. “Junk.”

He snapped up. “You said—”

“To look. If you don’t look, you won’t find anything.” She slipped fish-like from the one to the other: “You’re getting along with Zeb?”

“What? Uh,” said Ezra, blinking, “yeah.”

“Good,” said Hera, satisfied, and she raised her hand to wave the man over. “I’ll take these couplers.”

“We can’t use them.”

“Not as couplers,” Hera said, “dust baby.”

His grumbling persisted as they continued down the street, Hera bearing the heavy bag. He’d volunteered to carry it but Hera had of course assured him she would hardly let a kid break his back. 

“And I’m not a kid. Or a champ.” He kicked at a clod of dirt, and the lump burst, spraying its guts into his face. Ezra coughed and wafted the dust away.

“Champ? Who calls you that?”

“Zeb,” Ezra said. “And ‘brat,’ and he’s called me a dust baby too. And he says I snore when he’s the one keeping me up every night.”

“Snoring?”

“And farting,” said Ezra. “I’m probably going to die.”

She glanced, surprised, at him. “From Zeb’s snoring?” 

“From his farting!”

“Ah,” said Hera, nodding gravely.

Scuffing through the dirt with his hands in his pockets, Ezra considered the road with all the glumness of a man who knew the path his life would take and knew, too, he wouldn’t much like it.

“I don’t get why I can’t have my own room.”

“Because there aren’t any other rooms,” said Hera. She adjusted the bag higher, settling the weight more firmly upon her shoulder. “You’re certainly not sharing a room with Sabine.”

Ezra pinked. “I don’t want to share a room with Sabine.”

“And she’s not sharing a room with Zeb.” The thought overwhelmed. Hera shuddered. “They’d blow the whole ship up in hyperspace and laugh about it.”

“Why don’t you and Kanan just share a room?”

She stopped short. Ezra, heedless, with his head tipped so he watched his feet, continued. 

“It’s just taking up space when… Hera?”

The bag was very heavy. Her arm tingled, the weight of the couplers set against her shoulder enough to limit circulation. Her fingers in particular felt rather fuzzy.

“Why would I share a room with Kanan?”

“What, because you aren’t married?” Ezra affected worldliness. “I’m not dumb.”

She hesitated before she spoke. The necessity of ordering her words was very plain. Plainer still was the need to switch the bag so it would pinch her left shoulder rather than her right shoulder. Hera shuffled the bag across her chest. 

Now Ezra could look directly upon her face instead of around the bag.

“Kanan and I.” She was careful about it. Careful, too, that her features were marshaled. “Our relationship isn’t what you think it is.”

“You’re together,” said Ezra. He was suddenly uncertain. “Right?”

She had no desire to lie to him. Not to Ezra, who was young and alone, though no more alone than any other aboard the _Ghost_. So she told him the truth, and the truth was:

“No,” said Hera. “We aren’t.”

It was odd that a boy who had lived so long on the streets should show such flashes of innocence as he did then, that some part of him was yet unchanged. Hera had much changed.

“But you love each other,” said Ezra, “don’t you?”

She was quiet as she thought. He let her think. The pain in her shoulder beneath the couplers throbbed, and Hera latched on to it as she would a tethering line thrown to her in the long, cold vacuum of space. 

“What I feel for Kanan,” Hera said, “is…” 

She searched Ezra’s face for some understanding. We’re friends, she tried in her head. She tried: We’re partners. Both these things were true. They were not the whole of it.

The thought came unbidden to her of Kanan drawing tchin through his fingers and bending his dark head to kiss the pale tattoo of her clan, etched long ago upon her lekku. He did this tenderly, and he did it with his eyes open and his gaze soft and fixed upon her and his breath warm as he then sucked the tip into his mouth with a sweetness Hera was afraid to name.

So she said only what she could say.

“What we’re doing,” she said. “This fight against the Empire. Our mission. What that is, is so much bigger than anything else. Everything that we do is for that. It has to be. Kanan is…”

Hera remembered, too, the telltale curve of his smile, pressed to her lek as he cradled tchin to his face. She’d lain beside him in bed that night, that second time, and felt her heart moving as if it were a thing outside of her.

She drew breath. “Kanan knows that this is what we have to do.”

Ezra’s eyes were turned down. Slowly he said, “But if you do love each other… You’d want to be together.” He looked at Hera. “If you loved each other.”

“Sometimes,” Hera said, “what you want doesn’t matter.”

“So what does matter?” he asked finally. He looked again at her, and briefly she saw in the sloped angle of his brow something like accusation. Then it had gone.

“Stopping the Empire,” said Hera. “Freeing Lothal. Fighting for lives other than our own and purposes greater than whatever they’ve tried to give us. That’s what we _need_ to do. What we have to do. And that will always be more important than what we want.”

He was a child. She saw that. But she had been a child once, too. Once, she thought, Kanan had been a child.

Hera heaved the bag to rest in her elbow, that she could reach for Ezra with her other hand and cup his shoulder. She squeezed.

“Do you understand, Ezra?”

His eyelashes flickered. Those bright, violet eyes glanced at her then dropped.

“I guess,” he said.

She waited but though he breathed in through his nose and opened his mouth, he said nothing else. Ezra’s glance passed over her.

Please, she thought. Understand.

Hera squeezed his shoulder again then let him go. 

“Come on,” she said lightly. “I don’t like leaving Zeb and Kanan alone for this long.”

Ezra took the offering. His shoulders eased. Together they walked, Hera cradling the bag of couplers Ezra had found amongst the junk.

“It’s not like they could’ve gotten into trouble buying food. Kanan’s probably still arguing about the price of lettuce, or telling Zeb he has to ‘stick to the grocery plan.’” Ezra rolled his eyes. “Master Serious All the Time. I bet if a fight started in the street Kanan would yell at everyone to keep it down.”

“One day,” said Hera, as normalcy surrounded her, “remind me to tell you how I met Kanan.”

*

But once did Kanan come to her. Of the rules they had set, none specified he should not ask her. Occasionally she thought from a look he gave her, or his hand on the back of her pilot’s seat, or the vibrato of his laugh, that he would knock at her door. She resolved to let him in. Yet in the end Hera would fall asleep without company.

He said nothing of it. She said less. 

That Kanan should prove recalcitrant surprised her. The early months of their partnership after Gorse were marked with his easy smiles and easier jokes. He’d flirted as she expected him to flirt: carelessly. She thought her amusement was what he’d expected. They were testing the lines then.

After the cold of Stygeon Prime, even Lothal’s hazy sunlight seemed warm. Hera made hot caf and wrapped her hands about the mug. She carried that heat with her as she walked the _Ghost_ , mapping its corridors with her feet.

Chopper nattered at her from the alcove where he worked.

Hera raised her eyes. “Nesting’s what birds do.”

Flipping his arm in a circle then reversing it, Chopper hooted.

“I just like to make sure everything’s where I left it.”

And where else would it be?

“Just a silly thing us fleshies do,” she said. “Don’t fuss your circuits about it. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me either.”

“Blah,” said Chopper.

“Send me those telemetry readings when you’re done,” Hera called as she continued her wander.

“Blah!” said Chopper.

The _Ghost_ was unchanged. All paths led her home, to the bridge. Her hands were fully toasty in her gloves, and the caf had ceased to steam. She sipped it and deemed it worthy. Kanan had a way with the machine, but Hera wasn’t so half bad at getting it to dispense what she wanted. 

The sun was migrating toward its bed, near to the horizon, and the _Ghost_ ’s shadow stretched across the drought-struck plains. Kanan and Ezra had moved farther from the _Ghost_ to remain in the dwindling sunlight. 

Cradling the mug, Hera leaned against the console with her elbows set upon it. The bitter scent of the caf caught at her nose. She breathed deeply of it and held the smell in her mouth till the edge of it blunted.

They were too far to make out words, and Hera had no desire to switch on the _Ghost_ ’s external microphones. Each person’s moments were their own. She sipped again at the caf and thought wryly that Kanan did have a sweet touch with the machine.

Ezra fluttered his hand at Kanan: shoo, shoo. A pantomime played out in brief: Kanan doubtful, Ezra insistent, at last Kanan relenting. He held his hands up in the classic don’t shoot gesture, and Hera interpreted it as don’t blame me if this crackpot idea goes south fast. She rolled her eyes and smiled into the mug.

Walking into the taller grass, so the distance between them doubled, Kanan then stopped and turned. Far enough? 

Ezra flapped his hand again. Kanan’s arms folded across his chest. No farther. He was drawing the line. 

So Ezra shrugged and turned and walked in the opposing direction. He took the lightsaber with him. As Kanan cupped his mouth to shout at Ezra, Hera bent to laugh into her caf.

“What’s so funny?”

Sabine, hand towel draped around her neck, looked curiously at Hera through her wet bangs. With a small comb she was untangling her hair.

“Just some grass-cats playing.” Hera turned and rested her arse on the console. “Got all cleaned up?”

“Ugh.” Sabine wrinkled her nose. “I can still smell ozone. What a joke! The best prison in the galaxy and the buckets use the same cheap cartridges. What’s Ezra doing out there?”

“Playing,” said Hera. She glanced over her shoulder.

Twisting as he wound up for the pitch, Kanan stepped forward and low to sling the rock across the distance made. Ezra’s yelp was audible, but just.

“Dummy,” said Sabine. She was smiling. Bringing the towel over her head, she scrubbed at her newly neatened hair. 

“So how was the prison?”

The tip of Sabine’s nose poked out. “Kind of a let down.”

“You broke into and then out of the most remote and heavily guarded prison in the whole empire—”

“Yeah, I know,” said Sabine, grinning as she popped like a daisy from under the towel, “cool, right?”

“And it was a let down?”

“Maybe just a little let down,” Sabine hedged.

“No, I want to hear this,” said Hera, settling more comfortably on the dash. “Please, explain how this failed to meet your expectations.”

Sabine rolled her shoulders and sighed. In shorts and a work-out shirt, with her hair combed then scruffed, she looked especially young as she dropped into her checkered chair.

“After that first wave of guards right at the entrance, security was pretty lax.” She rolled her shoulder again and tugged the towel from her neck. “It took ages for anyone to respond. No way could you get away with that anywhere _actually_ professional.”

Hera raised her tattooed brow. “You didn’t think the Spire’s guards were professional?” 

Again Sabine said, “No way!” She snapped the towel for emphasis. “They were totally coasting on the prison’s rep. Well—some of the late arrivals, they were on the ball. But I think they came with that creepy guy with the ‘saber.”

Hera hummed and drank caf. The gathering dusk had the bridge in shadow too, and what sunlight remained did so at her back. She thought of turning to mark the sun’s course. Very easy after that to look elsewhere and try to translate how Kanan stood, or walked, with a hand to shade his eyes or not. 

Around and around Sabine was twisting the towel. Her gaze was somewhere low and somewhere far. 

“Worried?”

“No,” Sabine said quickly. Then she scratched at her hairline, behind her bangs. “Not much.”

“It wasn’t what any of us hoped for,” Hera said. “So you aren’t alone.”

Sabine’s eyes dropped. “Yeah.”

If Sabine were troubled she would come to Hera with it. Hera trusted this. Sabine had been Ezra’s age when she joined the crew, and intellectually Hera knew that Sabine was not much younger now than Hera when Hera had made the choice of resistance.

“So,” said Hera, “I heard you made a few miracles.”

The tension pinching Sabine’s mouth dissipated. “You should have seen them! They weren’t as showy as they could have been, though. I didn’t have enough time to put anything really great together.”

“I’m sure they were beautiful,” said Hera, laughing.

Sabine wafted her hand and the towel with it. “Too much blast powder. Wish I’d put some dye in them,” she said wistfully. “That place was so sterile inside. All grey and white and blech.”

“Sounds like the usual one every system Imperial depot.”

Suddenly Sabine’s grin returned, sharp-edged and satisfied. “Maybe not the usual.”

Rocking her head back Hera acted the mother, presented with her child’s incorrigible delinquency. What shame, brought the family; what tragedies.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing special. Just a couple firebirds in the lifts. I left most of my sprays on the _Ghost_.”

“Well,” said Hera, “the Empire will hate having to clean them up.”

“If the weird guy wasn’t right behind us,” said Sabine, “I would have written ‘Suck It, Palpatine’—” She cast her hands out wide, as if to encompass a grand marquee. “All over the hangar bay. Might even have made the Holo News.”

“Probably not.”

“Probably,” Sabine agreed.

Hera drained the last of the caf. Looking again to some other place, Sabine rotated her seat slightly. Her thumb brushed the teeth of the comb. The plastic burr ticked.

“So what are we doing now?”

“The same thing as before,” said Hera. She tipped her head to draw Sabine’s attention. “Jobs where we find them. We might have to stay low-profile for a few weeks. Fulcrum has a couple things lined up that we can do.”

Sabine rested her cheek in her hand. Her eyes narrowed. “Are you ever going to let us in on who this Fulcrum is?”

Evenly, Hera held Sabine’s gaze. “When it’s prudent. Then I’ll let you know.”

“So, never,” Sabine grumbled.

“Never’s a very strong word,” said Hera. “You just don’t need to know yet. Trust me.”

The girl winched her mouth. Her gaze sidled away and Sabine turned in her seat.

Finally she nodded and said, “All right.”

Sooner or later she would ask again. What else could Hera say to her? As Hera padded about inside and without the _Phantom_ , checking the shuttle for any hidden damage the vast flying rays of Stygeon Prime might have dealt it, she considered the prospect. 

The shuttle was solid. An exterior seal had shifted and that would need tending, but the three seals layered beneath it had held. Hera reset the diagnostics program to run through the ventilation system. Fuel lines next. The vents hummed.

Secrets and secrets, Hera thought. The less Sabine knew, the safer she would be if the worst came to pass. They had evaded capture this time, but there was no certainty they could do so again.

She swept her palm over the dash and then sat in the pilot’s seat to wait for the program to run its course. The clean metal smell inside the shuttle still held a trace of Zeb’s fur-stink. There was something comforting about that. 

When it was only Hera and the _Ghost_ , she had worried less because she had no one to worry about. She sighed then hit the port vents to filter out Zeb’s smell.

Lothal’s night was well underway when she finished with the _Phantom_. The exterior seal was the one problem and that a simple fix. Yawning, the caf’s stimulating effects long since drained, Hera retired to her room.

Indistinct thoughts of modifications she might make to the _Phantom_ occupied her as she undressed. Zippers to open, buttons to pop, all the ritual steps she had to take. The cap, as ever, was sticky with a layer of sweat and pulled on her tender skin.

Hera rubbed her fingers at the base of tchun. Too tired now to moisturize as she ought to each night, to prevent chafing from the cap. She needed to wash it, just as she needed to rub lotion into the roots of tchun-tchin. 

Hera stepped into her low-cut night shirt and snagged shorts. The front of the shirt gaped over her breasts and hung openly at her back. The cool air was pleasant now, less so later. The silent emptiness of the room sat on her.

Master Luminara Unduli was dead.

The knock at her door startled Hera. She thought perhaps it was Ezra. He’d been subdued the whole of the flight back to the _Ghost_ and the flight after that to Lothal. Hera crossed to the door and pressed the wall panel to open it.

Kanan stood, a silhouette, just outside her room. He was without his armor but booted, yes, his hair tied out of his face. 

The face was what arrested her. His lips were thin, his brow heavy. Briefly, Hera only stared. She could not think why he was at her door at this hour.

His eyes dropped. He saw her dress, as it was, and his mouth tightened, his jaw too. Kanan rubbed at his cheek with his fingers. He looked away.

“Sorry,” he said roughly. “I…”

His boot scraped. He turned.

Hera caught his shoulder, stripped of the metal plating he usually wore. She said, “Don’t just stand out here,” and she tugged.

He came to her then. The door whispered shut at his back. With his brow still so weighted, he looked at her and he did so unblinkingly. His jaw worked. 

Her heart was shaking. The hugeness of the thing was terrible, and she saw how it took its shape in the breath he drew to speak.

Hera placed her hands, one at each of his shoulders, and rose on her toes to kiss him. Their lips grazed. His breath stuck. Her eyes were open; she looked at him as he was looking at her. They separated. The softness of their parting pricked her. 

She tried for equanimity.

“I saw that… You and Ezra were outside earlier.”

“Yeah,” said Kanan. “He, uh. He wants me to teach him.”

“I could have told you that.” She curled her hand around his nape, to brush her thumb through the root of his ponytail.

“You did tell me.”

“Well,” said Hera, “maybe you can believe me now.”

“I believed you.” He drifted to her, winding about her, a hand at the base of her head, tucked beneath her lekku, and its partner set at the hollow of her back. 

Hera kissed him again, as tender. His lips parted. He exhaled into her mouth.

“You should believe Ezra, too,” Hera said. “He’s just a kid.”

Kanan stroked the swell of her head, the roundness of it and how it tapered. He’d pulled back just enough to study her face.

“I can’t mess this up,” he said.

Hera smiled and brushed his jaw with her fingertips. 

“You won’t,” she said. They none of them could afford to fail.

His eyes closed. “Neither will you,” he said.

Lightly she said, “Don’t try to push your issues off on me,” but her throat was thick.

Kanan smiled and said, “All right. No more pushing,” and nuzzled her cheek.

This ground, she knew. Delicately she worked her fingers in his hair, savoring the scratch of it and the simultaneous softness on her hairless knuckles. 

“You could push a little,” Hera said. She fluttered her eyelashes coyly.

“You could push a lot,” said Kanan, and she pulled him to her bed, where at the end of it all he said her name against her breast over and over, his lips shaping it, his tongue making it. 

Hera. Hera. 

His dark hair was half loose and his hands were brown and beautiful and dusted with black hair on the long and square knuckles as he slid his palms down her green belly and over her pitching hips. Like that in her bright room he said her name, as she coiled her legs and gasped through her teeth, clenched to keep what was in her mouth from falling out. Her lekku hung from the edge of the bed. Gravity dragged at her. She was unmoored.

“Hera,” he said. Only her name. That was all it meant. His lips were so gentle on her breast. He kissed her like that, like it meant: oh, what it couldn’t mean. Hera. Hera.

She squeezed her eyes shut against it; she squeezed her legs around him; she squeezed so that she was like stone, and when Hera broke she broke only as stone would, without a heart to want for more.

*

Hera descended the spiraling staircase from the second floor with its private rooms to the main bar. The staircase allowed for little discretion, situated as it was as a central fixture in the large public room. More than a few patrons thought it necessary to whistle at her or call out their own invitations. The private rooms in the higher levels were for escorts.

Kanan was as she’d left him, more or less. Still at one of the many circular bars scattered across the floor, still on a stool with his left heel caught in the rungs, knee bent, and his right leg sprawled at an angle with the toe wedged in the rungs of the next stool over. All the better to show off the breadth of his hips.

He was frowning now though, looking narrowly across the floor, and he had a drink, a tall, fat glass that glowed.

“Did someone spit in your drink?” 

Hera slipped on to the stool he’d reserved. Kanan left his feet where they were placed. His frown sharpened.

“I’m thinking about spitting in his.”

She glanced, uncaring. A tall Trandoshan with dusty red scales flashed a long tongue at her. 

“Hers,” Hera corrected. “And why?”

Kanan turned abruptly, slinging his right foot forward out of the rungs of her stool to brace it on the bar before them. 

“You must have missed the things they were yelling.”

“No, I heard them.” 

The loudness of the music, two different DJs playing at far ends of the bar, had obscured most of the details. Hera could put a solid wager on what most of the comments had consisted of; nothing she hadn’t brushed off before.

“I just know not to pay any attention to them.” She stuck her finger in his ribs, lightly. “Didn’t you once ask me to go wandering with you?” 

“I wasn’t as bad as all that,” he said, but he cupped his chin in his hand and his fingers moved across his cheek.

“No,” she said again. Gently she tickled her fingers up his side then withdrew. “You weren’t.” Hera mirrored him, her chin in her right palm as he held his chin in the palm of his left hand. She smiled. “As a matter of fact, you were fairly charming.” 

Reaching across with her left hand she flicked his wrist, bent back. Another stroke to reassure.

His gaze, lidded, sidled. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

He curled his fingers so his knuckles were at his jaw. The corner of his mouth turned slyly up.

“Flirting,” he said.

Fussing her mouth, Hera looked stern. “No go,” she said, and she ticked the flat of her fingernail against his nose. 

Relaxing, Kanan dropped his hand to fold his arms on the bar. His thighs were warm and wide and sleekly compressed. Ever with such tight pants, often leather, sometimes the hardy, stiffer fabrics preferred in freighter work. She was careful not to check.

“So,” he said, “did you get what you came for?”

“I did,” said Hera. Her tapping fingers migrated to the glass. The drink inside was thick, brightly pink, with a phosphorescent glow. She trickled her fingertips along the rim. “Can I try?”

His eyebrow curved. “Sure.”

Wiggling upright, Hera grasped the glass lazily and drew it near. He’d only sipped at it, and so she had to tip it just to drink from it. She recoiled, her lips pursing. 

“Oh! That’s so sweet!”

“Thought you liked sweet things,” said Kanan. He was grinning.

Hera laid her fingertips to her mouth and steadied. “I wasn’t expecting it to be that sweet.”

“Non-alcoholic,” he explained. “It’s a fruit blend. The glow’s synthetic. You add about, uh, four or five drops of moon salt to the liter. Light it up.”

She eyed him over her fingers. “You’re laughing at me.”

He didn’t deny it. His thighs tensed, bunching. “I’ll get some straws,” Kanan said as he dropped easily from the stool. He brushed her shoulder with his open hand. The inside of his arm brushed, more delicately, tchin. An accident. 

Hera sipped at the glass and looked along the small, rounded length of this bar. Unlike the other bars pocking the floor, this one was empty but for a few couples who had retreated from the crowded dance floors. 

No bartender or attendant. A juice bar. Tchin itched, low and against her shoulder. Embarrassment, Hera thought. She didn’t have much to do with bars. In for information and out with it.

A straw penetrated her vision from the left, her back. Hera startled. He’d returned. She took the straw, and Kanan moved around her to reclaim his stool. He sat with his back twisted, his knees parted to her, right arm slung upon the bar.

“A juice bar,” she said.

“I like fruity drinks,” Kanan protested. “They taste better. Have you ever had Danteel bitters?”

Hera shook her head; her lekku, too, twitched in the negative. 

“They got their name for a reason.” He shucked the plastic wrapping for his straw. “Have you ever had an alcoholic drink?”

She held her hand out for the wrapper. “A few now and then. When I couldn’t get out of it.”

“When it was useful,” he translated. Kanan wiggled the straw at her. “Your lekku are giving you away. Better watch it.”

Hera shrugged her shoulders. Bare, for the purposes of disguise. “Not many people care to look past the shape,” she said.

He tipped his chin up to consider her through his lowered eyelashes. Short as most human eyelashes were short. 

“You’re doing it again,” she said.

“Doing what?” He followed the echo.

She drank through her straw, careful to keep her hand at her mouth. When she’d done, she said lightly: “Flirting.”

“Just admiring your technique,” he said easily. “Not many pilots are as good at evading on the ground.”

Hera twirled the straw between her little finger and thumb. Sideways, she watched Kanan. 

“And what am I supposed to be evading?”

He watched her, too. His chest had turned to her. All of him had turned to her. Unused, his straw bobbed. He tapped it quietly on the edge of the bar. Two ticks, three. A fourth. 

Unlike Hera he had not dressed for disguise. He hadn’t the wardrobe for it. What pay she gave him as crew he funneled into food, supplies, repairs, or else he saved it. She thought it likely Kanan had a box of aurodium strips in his quarters, though she wouldn’t ask him about it.

The music drummed at her skin. She was perspiring, her shoulders warm even without sleeves to cover them. She didn’t much care to finish the glowing, sweet drink, whatever it had cost. The blue of Kanan’s eyes seemed to glow, too. A trick of the light. Everyone seemed to glow here. He rubbed his thumb idly along the straw. The rasp of it: that, she imagined. The music was far too loud, and far too rough. 

His shoulders roiled. He leaned upon his elbow, set on the bar. He would ask her to dance. 

Why think it? Five inches separated his hoisted knee from her thigh. Her lek itched, not tchin but tchun. Both of them. The five inches was not enough. 

Over the year they had traveled together the purposefulness of his flirting had dissipated. If he asked her to dance, it meant only that he had asked her to dance. 

He cleared his throat. Stubble darkened his jaw. He set his straw, dry, on the bar. His fingers hung off the edge. He looked at her. He smiled. Kanan jerked his head toward the floor. 

She thought of the money he must have sequestered, and she thought of what she meant to ask him. He would ask her to dance, and Hera would tell him, “No.”

“How about we get out of here and find something to eat?” he asked her over the music.

Hera’s eyelashes dropped. She blinked slowly. The thickness and length of her eyelashes masked the world then revealed it, unchanged. He’d cocked his head in the opposite direction, toward the bar.

She held her confidence to her. “You don’t want to stay and reminisce?”

Kanan looked about the hugeness of the bar. A club, in truth. He looked dryly back at her.

“It’s a little classier than the joints I used to work.”

“Don’t be so self-deprecating,” she said. “It was very classy, for a filthy dive full of degenerates.”

“You love degenerates,” said Kanan. “That’s why you’re stuck with me.”

“How lucky,” said Hera. She slipped from the stool and left her straw sliding in the glass. “For you, of course.”

Kanan laughed as he followed a step behind her, just short of her shoulder. Together they pressed through the crowd. The warmth of his chest prickled her shoulder, tchun, the swoop of her shoulder blade. 

The music shifted. Something gentler played. The corner of the disc, wedged into the boned undercarriage of her shirt, bit her breast. To sway might nudge the corner deeper. 

They exited the club without incident. In the smog-thick street outside, Kanan stepped away. Cooler, fouler air came up to embrace her. The sweat dried on her skin. 

He left it till they were on the _Ghost_. 

Alone on the bridge, Hera extracted the disc from her shirt. She turned the disc, hot from her skin, over in her hand. It had the ridging characteristic of a once and done: a disc that would self-encrypt after the first viewing, a randomized and spontaneous encryption for which no key existed. 

The disc clicked mutely as she slotted it in the port. The console’s reader panel flicked on. The back-light steadied.

The door whisked open. Hera moved to cover the screen. Then she stopped. He’d know soon. Perhaps not everything. She let her hand fall casually over the screen.

Kanan paused in the doorway. His hand was at the switch for the lights. He let his hand fall too. 

“You’ll hurt your eyes,” he said, “reading in the dark.”

She hummed consent. His silhouette settled upon the door frame. Patiently Hera waited.

“Does this have to do with your secret meeting?”

She allowed that it might.

He crossed his arms at his waist, hands loose. “You planning on telling me about it?”

Hera looked to her hand on the screen. The light between her fingers, lending to her skin a pale tint. Her thumb, as a column, half-obscured a slice of the diagram before her palm swallowed the rest.

“The less you know, the safer we’ll both be.”

“It’s serious,” he said. 

“Yes,” she said. 

“All of your missions are serious. What makes this one different?”

She exhaled. “I can’t tell you.”

He was silent. Then he stirred. “You don’t drink.”

“Just a few—”

“Now and then,” he said. “Like tonight.”

She glanced at him and smiled. “Juice.”

“You didn’t know it was juice.” He didn’t smile. “What is it?”

“It’s a job.”

“I know it’s a job. What kind of a job?”

“You’re crew,” Hera said to her hand on the screen. Then she looked at him. “Unless you’re working with me on my missions, then this isn’t anything you need to concern yourself with.”

His hands tightened on his arms.

“Crew, right.” Shrewdly he considered her. “Well, as your crew, maybe I deserve to know when you’re planning on doing something reckless and crazy.”

If the reality of his anger had surprised her, the force of hers grounded her. 

“I understand,” she said, “if you don’t want to risk your life. But actually doing something about this isn’t crazy, and it isn’t reckless. You’ve been here long enough. You must have seen that by now.”

But he was saying: “No, you don’t understand.” His arms uncrossed; he stabbed at her with two fingers. “Sticking your neck out, you’re just going to get your throat slit. They’re going to catch you—”

“They’re not going to catch me.” She turned scornful, amused. It was the familiar shield. “You really haven’t seen anything. And so what if they did?”

“So what if they did,” he repeated. “So what if—” Kanan turned on his toe then reeled back to face her. “What the hell difference are you going to make if you’re dead?”

“What difference are you making?” She threw it, aimed precisely. “You’ve been here for a year. Cooking. Cleaning. Helping with the _Ghost_.” Momentarily she tempered her focus. “And I’m grateful for it. But what’s your plan?” She held her hand out to him, her fingers flat. “Do you think in four years this is where you’ll be? This is what you’ll be doing? In one year? Is this what you want to be doing?”

His lips compressed. His nose flared. 

“So I should be like you, huh?” Kanan demanded. She was startled again. His anger had blunted. Not gentled, but like his features, tightened. “What are you fighting for? Huh? Is this what you want to be doing, just nipping at the Empire’s heels? Pestering them?”

He too could aim.

“Nothing starts from nothing,” she snapped. “I’m not the only one taking a stand against the Empire. Every job I take has a purpose. It’s a statement every time.”

“To who?” He spread his arms wide. “Who are you making this statement to?” His fingers crooked inward. “Me?”

“To anyone who listens,” she said harshly. “To anyone who cares to pay attention, or to do something.”

“I’m happy to still have my head,” said Kanan. “That’s something I’ve done.”

“And that’s impressive, isn’t it!” said Hera. “So at least you’ve done that.”

He looked at her. He would not look away. His chest rose and fell, so violently. 

He said, “Do you remember Gorse?”

She said, “Yes. I remember.”

“On Vidian’s ship,” he said. “You would have died.”

“And if he’d succeeded,” she said, “then more people would have died. More people than me.”

“It doesn’t bother you,” said Kanan. “It doesn’t bother you even a little bit, that you could die.”

Hera took in a breath and then let it go. Her eyes closed.

“I didn’t die,” she said, “because you were there. Because you decided to believe in what I believed, even if it was just for that one reason. To save those people from dying.”

He swallowed. In the absolute stillness she heard him do this. Too, she heard her self say this:

“Tomorrow I’m taking a shuttle to the next job. Two weeks. Infiltration. I’m leaving the _Ghost_ with you until I get back.”

“If you get back,” he said.

She met his gaze. The thickness of her temper lingered sour in her mouth. There was a grief in her throat, too.

Hera said, “When I get back.”

“At least tell me where you’ll be.”

“If you were my partner,” Hera said, “I would.”

Kanan went on looking at her. His lips flattened. He wetted them; then they tightened, and his jaw clenched, and he looked to the night sky outside the _Ghost_ before he turned to look at her again. 

“But I’m just crew,” he said.

Hera said, “But you’re just crew.”

“And if you don’t come back,” he said.

“It’s not the first time I’ve done a job like this.”

He scowled. “Whatever it is.”

“If I don’t come back,” said Hera, “then I guess the _Ghost_ is yours.”

“Not if,” said Kanan. “You said ‘when.’”

“Then when I get back, the _Ghost_ had better still be here.”

His brow furrowed. He said: “I wouldn’t take the _Ghost_.”

Hera tried on a smile. It came readily enough; she held it in place.

“I know,” she said, still smiling. She was smiling even as she turned away from him to the screen. “I was only teasing.”

Her fingers rested on the screen. Hera blinked twice. The quiet inhale-exhale of her breathing steadied her. Too dangerous, she thought.

“Maybe,” Hera said, “it’s time for you to find some place else to be.”

Kanan said, “What?”

“I appreciate everything you’ve done. And I still think—I still believe,” she said, glancing at him, “that you could do a lot of good. If you decided to try.”

She had meant only to glance, but the look on him arrested her. His eyes were wide; then he hardened. Kanan’s gaze dropped. He laughed without humor.

“You know,” he said, “usually I’m the one doing the dumping.”

“It isn’t personal,” said Hera.

“Nah,” said Kanan, “not with you, Captain.” He scrubbed at his chin with his palm, and he would not again look at her.

Hera would not look away. She said, “You knew from the start that this is what I do.”

He closed his eyes. “Yeah. I did,” he said.

This is where it stops, Hera thought. Smart of Kanan to have saved what of his pay he could. The near space port had craft heading to a multitude of worlds, many of them insignificant to the Empire. He’d find a berth with little trouble.

“You can be more than what you are,” said Hera. “I know it. And so do you.”

Kanan straightened. His shoulders unbent. Again he brushed at his goatee.

“I’m not that great a guy,” he said as he turned from her.

“You are,” she said. “You could be.”

He said, “Two weeks. That’s what you promised. When you get back, the _Ghost_ ’ll be here.”

The console was cool on her palm. She sleeked her thumb along the edge of the screen and thought.

“And you?” she asked.

He paused at the door, his hand on the frame. A shoulder rose: he shrugged, and then he pushed off the jamb.

“Depends,” said Kanan, “on whether or not you still need a crew.”

The door closed behind him. It whisked, like sighing. For longer than she ought have done, Hera watched the door, her hand on the console screen and her mouth empty. She had a feeling like there was something else she should have said. What else could she have said? Nothing she hadn’t said before.

Squaring her shoulders, Hera spun the chair around, to finish reading the dossier. The characters did not at first resolve into coherent words. She rubbed at her eyes. Too tired, she thought; but of course that was a lie. Hera pinched her thumb and first finger, one to an eye. 

When she lowered her hand, the words were clear. She read the file, copied the attached schematics to the drive, and then closed the disc. The console whirred a moment: a beep, when the encryption had done. 

The disc ejected. She took it in hand. Warm, still, not from her skin but from the console. The ridge on the underside stood out against her palm. Hera snapped the disc in half and pitched both pieces into the trash port.

The truth of it was Hera had grown used to him. She expected him now. In the morning Kanan woke before she did. He knew her caf habits, how she liked it and when she needed it. Over the last year Hera had eaten more fresh-made meals than she had in the eight years before. 

Hera left the bridge to find Kanan had retired to his room. In the hallway she hesitated. She thought again there was something else she needed to say. The door was shut to her. Had he locked it? 

Hera lifted her hand; she held it in the air; she let it fall and then she went to her own quarters. The job. She had to prepare for the job. She hunted through her wardrobe for the sorts of things she thought a girl working at a bar might wear. Everything she owned was entirely too sensible. 

Holding up a plain yellow shirt with long sleeves to the light, Hera wondered if Kanan might have recommendations; he’d worked at bars. The light came thinly through the shirt. 

“Blast it,” said Hera, and she crumpled the shirt in her hands and pitched it toward the open duffel beside her bed.

If he went, she would miss him. She thought of Kanan’s slow smiles, and how he whistled when he cooked, and his bad jokes. He fussed. A wink would rumple his cheek. His laughs husked. He startled if she moved too close to him; she’d heard how his breath caught in his nose.

She had wanted, at the club, for Kanan to ask her to dance. She had wanted him to buy her a drink, as if Hera were someone who would accept a drink from him. If he stayed she would let it go on like this, Kanan as crew. 

And you can’t let it go on, Hera thought. Not like this. If she’d grown accustomed to his presence then she could grow accustomed to his absence. She’d done just fine by herself before Gorse. That was how the rebellion was anyway. People came, and they went, for one reason or another.

She left before he woke that morning, early in the dark hours. A note on the console with a more specific timeline; when to expect her, how long to wait. The number for a small, discreet credit account in the event of an emergency, though Hera supposed if he had saved his pay as she suspected then he wouldn’t have much need of that account.

She didn’t linger on the _Ghost_. Nothing could come of it, and she’d too much to do before she caught the shuttle to the spaceport. New clothes, all of them impractical; cosmetics, a false ID: she added them to her duffel.

The spaceport was a significant hub, and so Hera was unsurprised to share a seat with a stranger. She smiled reflexively at him and turned away to consider her reflection in the window. The make-up worried her. She wore cosmetics so rarely that she wondered if it looked clumsy; she needed the mark to think of her as a pretty woman, good for luring in customers and of little concern outside of that.

Hera scrunched her face to study how it looked. In the transparisteel surface, details were softened, and she pressed nearer with two fingers at her eye, to better study the effect of eye shadow. 

Movement distracted her. A man, his features indistinct, moved down the aisle. He was, in the window, tall and thin, and Hera looked at the slope of his shoulders with her fingers gone still on her cheek. The figure stopped at the seat she shared. 

Her fingers slipped from her face. She turned. Her lekku swung freely.

Kanan, his elbow on the seat before them, smiled at her. A satchel hung from his shoulder.

“Hey. Found you.” His breath was rough. He smiled at the man next to Hera and grabbed the man by his arm. “How you doing?”

“Wait,” the man said, “I’m sitting here—”

“Yeah, you were,” Kanan agreed, shoving the man out and down the aisle, “better seats back there. See it, right in the back? Two seats all to yourself. There you go.”

“You can’t push me around—”

Hera said, “Kanan, what—” Her teeth clicked over the rest. 

A Rodian in a pink dress leaned into the aisle to look curiously at them. She wasn’t the only passenger gawking. 

Hera said, “I thought you weren’t coming.”

Giving the man one final hard push, Kanan took the emptied seat beside Hera. He smiled again at her: at all the people watching; and he leaned near to Hera. The Rodian half-stood out of her seat, and the human woman beside her rose, too, clutching at the Rodian’s shoulders. They fitted together neatly: lovers.

“We didn’t get to finish talking,” Kanan said. “You said your piece, but you left before I got the chance to say mine.”

She wondered at his breathing, at the light satchel he carried, at the way he looked at her. She wondered, too, how he had found her.

She asked, “And what’s that?” and she was glad for her steadiness.

He took a breath; he held it. His shoulders straightened. He quirked his mouth, and then, of all things, Kanan offered her his hand.

“Let’s, uh, make it official,” Kanan said. “Partners.”

The Rodian sucked in a breath.

Hera stared at Kanan. His cheek rumpled. She could think of nothing to say, not right away. It seemed to her impossible that he should be sitting beside her and not on the _Ghost_ , reading the note she’d left as the caf machine brewed. 

“Just like that,” said Hera.

He shifted, and the hand he offered he now turned so the palm was given up to Hera. The skin of his palm was dusky, a shade lighter than the back of his hand. 

“Just like that,” he said. 

Murmurs, about them. The Rodian and her wife were both looking avidly on to see if Hera would take his hand or not. Even the man Kanan had displaced was watching. 

“There’s still a lot we have to talk about,” she said, and she glanced about the shuttle then at him. 

Kanan nodded minutely. “Later,” he agreed. Then his cheeks pinched; he tried and failed to quell his growing smile. “When we’re, ah, alone.”

Someone on the shuttle sighed. Hera stepped heavily on Kanan’s toe, and he ducked his head to hide his laugh. Sweetly, for the audience, she smiled, as though they were indeed lovers. But her heart was beating, beating so her ears hurt from it. 

She thought: How could it be so easy?

“There’s no going back on this,” she warned him.

“I know,” he said.

She said, “You can’t change your mind.”

“I won’t,” said Kanan. “Hey! Give me some credit. I thought it through, and this seems to me like it’s the right choice.”

“That’s not very romantic,” someone muttered.

“It’s going to be dangerous.”

“I like dangerous.”

“I couldn’t tell,” said Hera. 

She watched his hand. He held it out to her without wavering, and slowly she lifted her own.

“So,” said Kanan, “what’s it going to be? You and me. Partners?”

Hera touched his palm with her fingertips. Her hand slipped along his—fingers on his palm, then her palm to his—till for a moment they were clasping hands. The calluses on his palm rasped against the calluses of her own. His skin was very warm. 

She twisted her wrist; their hands straightened; she shook.

“Partners,” she said.

Kanan’s eyes crinkled. “You and me,” he said.

“Now kiss her!” said the Rodian’s wife.

A laughing grin flashed across Kanan’s lean features. Hera mouthed “no,” and she did not let go of his hand. He tipped his head, but his gaze remained on Hera.

“Nothing to see here, folks,” he said. “Just business.”

“ _Only_ business,” said Hera.

His fingers curled about her wrist. She held his wrist as neatly as he held hers.

“I remember,” said Kanan. “Just business, captain.”

The excitement dissipated; the audience did, too. The Rodian said something to her wife, and the woman sighed and said, “Well, you can’t blame me for _hoping_ ,” and Hera let go of Kanan’s hand. He let her go too.

“We _are_ going to have to talk,” said Hera quietly, when they were as alone as they could possibly be on a crowded shuttle.

“You said that, yeah,” said Kanan, and if he smiled, his eyes were serious. “And you’re right. We are.”

She wanted to ask him it then, all of it. Why did you change your mind? Why are you here? Do you mean it?

Instead Hera leaned back in her seat and said, “How exactly did you find me?”

Kanan folded his arms across his chest and cast his legs out into the aisle. He crossed them at the knees. “I, uh, may have cheated,” he said. Out from his elbow, his fingers wiggled.

“And that worked?”

“You don’t have to sound so skeptical.”

“I’ve seen you try to…” She wiggled her fingers. “And he got away.”

He shrugged with his hand then tucked it back into his elbow. “Easier with you than chasing down some guy I don’t know.”

Hera said, “A likely story. You let him get away with our credits,” but her skin felt overheated, her bare arms too dry. It occurred to her then to wonder if he could feel her: if some part of him was attuned to her. Hera folded her arms, too, and she did not know if she wanted to stand out like that for Kanan and, if she did, what it might mean.

“So,” said Kanan, “now that we’re partners. You want to let me in on what we’re doing here?”

“I’m going to a job,” said Hera. “You’re following me.”

“Guess I am,” said Kanan.

*

“So,” said Hera, “how about that tour?”

They lingered together at the threshold, at the juncture of the living area and the _Ghost_ ’s passageways. She’d her hand on his chest, her gloved fingertips set against the smooth metal of his pauldron.

“Well,” he said, “all the kids are in bed.”

“Mm, the kids,” said Hera, and what a fondness squeezed at her as she thought fleetly of them: Ezra, and Sabine. “Zeb, too?”

“Zeb, too,” said Kanan. “But it’s not my bed time yet. So I could kill some time.”

Hera laughed. Her fingers crawled from his chest to slip beside his neck, fitted now to the folds of his turtleneck. Kanan, smiling, covered her wrist. 

Lidding her eyes, Hera gave him a skeptical once-over. 

“If all you’re looking to do is kill time…”

“No, no,” he said, squeezing her arm, “I’m serious. How many years I’ve been flying with you, and I still don’t know everything there is to know about your ship?”

She wanted her gloves off, his sweater pulled free of his shoulders, his neck. 

“And you never will,” Hera said. His hand slipped to her elbow as she reached up to pinch his goatee; she tugged as she teased: “I’ve heard _all_ about you, Kanan Jarrus. Love ‘em and leave ‘em, that’s your style. Well, I won’t put up with that. The _Ghost_ is a very special ship.”

His smile crooked. When he blinked, his lashes swept over his eyes: languorous, that was how.

“Yeah,” he said, “she is. Finest ship I ever conned my way on-board.”

She smoothed her thumb along his jaw. The thick fabric of her glove rasped along his skin, and again Kanan cupped her wrist, that he might hold her hand at his cheek when she would have pulled away. She had meant to pull away only that she might lead him but then they were here, at the threshold still, with Kanan pressing her hand to his face.

Her fingers curled.

“That’s not how I remember it going.”

His eyes closed. He said, “Maybe your memory’s better than mine is,” with playful doubt.

“You came on as crew.”

“Told you I conned my way on-board,” he said, grinning. His eyes were still closed. “I just wanted a free ride off Gorse.”

“A free ride,” she said, “is that why you threw out all my MREs and bought—what was it?”

His eyes opened; the corners were rumpled. “Real food,” said Kanan, rumpling further around his edges. “Actual food.”

“A pretty good con.”

“Can you blame me?” he said. “I’ve never seen a ship quite like the _Ghost_. Before or since.”

“And you never will,” said Hera.

“You’re probably right,” he said. 

His hands settled on her hips. He drifted closer to her. The distance between them dwindled, till she set her toes on his boots and rose off her heels.

“I always am.”

She kissed him lightly, just the once. His mouth was warm. It was always so. Kanan pulled a breath through his nose and then he let it out and his breath was warm, too, on her cheek. Hera settled on her heels again.

“Knew you’d find some way to shut me up,” said Kanan, then his shoulders came forward and his back bent and his thumbs pressed into the hollows at top of her hipbones, and he kissed her as she had kissed him. 

His quarters, rather than hers. Kanan unzipped her from her flight suit while she worked at his armor, then the buckle of his belt. Boots to the side. He stroked her lekku as he undressed them, and when they were bared Kanan nuzzled them, his nose to the seam, his lips working as he kissed her there, or spoke to her. Hera hooked her fingers in the belt loops to either side of his zipper, and she hauled him with her to the bed.

His mouth was warm on her; it was always so. He kicked his trousers off and when she made to pull him up to her upon the bed Kanan went instead to his knees before her. His hands were on her knees; he stroked her thighs as he had stroked tchin and tchun. 

Kanan met her gaze. “Can I?” he asked. He rubbed his thumb along the curve of her knee.

Hera said, “Yes,” and she spread her knees to welcome him. His hands went with her knees; he looked up at her from the floor, and she said again, “Yes,” and she said his name.

He nosed the inside of her left knee, then the inside of her right knee, and his wide palms slid steadily up her thighs and then beneath them, hoisting. She grabbed at his one pillow, to fold it in half and set beneath her head. The weight of her lekku pooled on the sheets.

On his knees before her, Kanan bent to her. His tongue moved. He cupped her backside, and she tipped her hips up to him. She thought again of the hangar and those deep shadows.

“Stop thinking,” Kanan advised.

“You should apply yourself,” Hera countered. The hitch in her throat sold her out. To cover for it, she rested her hand on his head. 

Of all things, Kanan kissed her clit, somehow chaste in the doing. 

“You got it, captain.” 

She wound her fingers in his thick hair. He took guidance well, though, as usual, Kanan improvised. Twist his ear if she liked, but Kanan would tease her. Hera rolled her hips to meet his tongue, and his lips, and the little scrape now and then of his teeth, and Kanan smiled as he ate her out, as if it were something he had wanted to do for a very long time when it had only been a month. He moaned, too, softly. The vibration of it rattled her spine.

Pleasure moved through her, a heat that wound and wound so tightly inside her as she wound her fingers tighter and tighter in his hair. Her knees hooked. She crossed her ankles at his back. One of his hands slipped away from her arse; she did not begrudge him it. His other hand shifted out from under her, and he pressed a finger inside her. Hera’s hips stuttered. 

She said, “Kanan. Kanan, please,” and he pushed a second finger into her then crooked them both. 

“What was that, captain?” he asked. She pulled at his hair, but his smile only brightened. His lips gleamed. He sucked at the swell of his lower lip. He was cleaning the taste of her from it. 

Hera breathed in. She held it. Again he crooked his fingers. Lightly Kanan kissed her hip.

“Stop—teasing.”

“That an order?”

“Kanan,” she said. 

His smile eased. His eyes were dark, a trick of the shadows. He made no jokes then. The teasing was done. A third finger slipped into Hera, the rough pads of his fingers pressing against her through the wetness. Kanan slid his tongue between her folds and his lips—slicked again—closed about her clit. 

“Kanan,” she said again, “Kanan—” 

Hera closed her teeth against the rest. She tipped her head back as far as her lekku and the folded pillow would allow. The insides of her thighs were over-hot and trembling, and yet numb as well. Her lekku itched. He would not go. He stayed. Relentlessly he stayed with her through the budding of her orgasm, the peak of it, the expulsive heat. 

Hera made some small sound—a choking thing—and arched. She was coming into his mouth. He licked it from her, and he was—he had been—between her legs, Kanan brought himself off by his hand. He turned his face at the end of it, to press his nose and his brow to her thigh, and he sighed like letting go of a burden carried too long alone.

“Come up here,” she said raggedly, and Kanan waited a moment longer at the crease of her thigh, breathing. 

Then he lurched upwards, not to his feet but only to collapse onto the bed beside her. He left Hera the pillow but took her face in his hands and kissed her as she startled: kissed her wetly and without stopping till she put her hands against his chest and pushed him back so she might breathe. The taste of her was on Hera’s lips now too.

She said, “You didn’t have to,” and she gestured between his legs. Again Kanan kissed her, longly till they both needed breath. 

“I wanted to,” he said, and his gaze weighted her. 

They did not speak then of the possibility of death, or the lateness of the rescue. She thought perhaps he was afraid to speak of it, for reasons other than her own. 

In small, passing moments they settled together. Hera brushed the hair, freed of its tie, back from his shoulders. He dragged two fingers down the length of tchun, one finger to each side.

Her heart settled, too. She felt its beating slow. How it steadied as Kanan stroked her.

“I should go,” said Hera.

He brought the tip of tchun to his lips.

“Yeah,” said Kanan. “Before the kids wake up.” He ran his nose along tchun. His breath tickled her skin. He would let her go.

Slowly, not all at once, Hera curled her fingers about his wrist, as he had held her wrist in the doorway. 

“Ezra’s been training hard,” she said. “Maybe you could let him sleep in.”

Kanan looked at her. He swallowed. She heard the dryness of it. The knob in his throat shifted. He had come for them. Of course he had.

“Yeah,” Kanan said. “He could use a break.”

Hera said, “We could all use a little break,” and she set her head on Kanan’s shoulder, and he wrapped his arms about her to hold her near, and she tipped her chin up she might kiss the knob in his throat. Just the once. Only that. 

He fell asleep before she did, and in the dark she listened to his breathing and to her own breathing, till she was near enough to sleeping she could not distinguish between the two. Then Hera, too, slept.

When she woke, Kanan was with her.

**Author's Note:**

> SEX GOINGS ON: penetrative PIV sex, fingering, cunnilingus, and at one point Kanan kind of idly fellates Hera's lekku, because I guess I decided I'm into that.
> 
> Thanks for deciding to read 28k of porn and profound emotional constipation! [THUMBS UP!!!]


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